Leisure Time in an Elegant Setting

Artist: Pieter de Hooch (Dutch, Rotterdam 1629–1684 Amsterdam)

Date: ca. 1663–65

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: Extended canvas 22 15/16 x 27 5/16 in. (58.3 x 69.4 cm); original visible painted surface 21 5/8 x 26 in. (55 x 66 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Robert Lehman Collection, 1975

Accession Number: 1975.1.144

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 964

Like his contemporary Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch played a pioneering role in the advancement of genre painting in seventeenth century Holland. He was especially gifted as a painter of interiors--complex spatial arrangements stunningly beautiful in the manipulation of light. The Lehman picture is richly decorated with a marble floor and gilt-leather wall coverings, articulated by diffuse light from the window at left. The merry dialogue in the near ground is foiled by the mysterious encounter of a young man and elderly bearded figure in the antechamber and vestibule. De Hooch achieves extraordinary clarity and geometry in this grandly furnished chamber, qualities evocative of paintings he made in Amsterdam in the 1660s.

Inscription: Signed (on stretcher of chair): P. D. HOOCH

Probably Everill collection; Samuel S. Joseph, London by 1892; Mrs. Joseph, by 1907; [M. Knoedler and Co., London and New York], June 1911 (bought from Mrs. Joseph). Acquired by Philip Lehman from Knoedler in 1912.

Essays
The New York Dutch Room

Timelines
Low Countries, 1600-1800 A.D.

Vermeer and the Delft School
The Robert Lehman Collection. Vol. 2, Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Paintings: France, Central Europe, The Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings
European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born before 1865: A Summary Catalogue
Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Volume I and II
Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague
"The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 65, no. 1 (Summer, 2007)