The Courtyard of a House in Delft by Pieter de Hooch, 1629-1684
They do say that good art hits a nerve - it tingles the mind and moves the heart. This picture means a lot to me. I stumbled across it in a small, slightly darkened room, in the London’s National Gallery. There was a light shining down on it. The saturation of the original colours (sadly missing from the online versions) leapt off the canvass. I sat transfixed by it for some time. Now, I try to ‘pop in’ to see it everytime I am in the city. It has become a familiar friend.
Although not an expert in art, as I grow older, I am finding that I enjoy galleries more and more. And although I have been moved by paintings before, nothing for me has the power of this one. I have enjoyed the visual and emotional impact of Van Gogh’s Crows over a Cornfield in Amsterdam. I have felt captured by the nobility and grief in David’s Death of Socrates in New York. I have literally laughed out loud (much to my wife’s embarrassment) at Picasso’s Women Running on a Beach in Paris. And in Rome I have been made very, very afraid by Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath. Arguably, all of these paintings are greater than this one by Pieter de Hooch, a minor Dutch painter (they would certainly cost more to buy), but none of them speak to me so directly.
Having spent 30 years trying to inspire students with the richness of English literature I am well aware that what a poet or painter or musician intended are not necessarily what a reader or viewer or listener will ‘read into’ a particular work of art (assuming we could ever reasonably guess what the artist’s intentions were in the first place). All readers, viewers , and listeners will bring their own backgrounds - their history, experience, understandings, memories - to a particular piece. One meaning of a painting will exist, not in the artist’s mind, not on the canvass itself, but in the interaction between a particular viewer and a particular painting.
I discovered this painting at a particularly seismic time in my life. After nearly 40 years (over half my life, and virtually all of my adult life to date) of operating within a particular world view (evangelical Christianity) I came to the conclusion that I had been wrong, and started to see the world differently. It was against that background that I first encountered this painting.
Apart from the colour and brightness of the original, I think I was initially captivated by the composition. The artist clearly wants us to see two sides to this picture. There is a kind of balance. There are shutters open on either side. It is as if people are hidden and being invited to look out onto the two scenes. One side is neat. The architecture is formal. The brickwork is carefully patterned and framing the woman in an arch. Everything is man-made and blocks out the heavens. There is control and order and pattern. In the other part of the picture there is more chaos. The brickwork is being encroached by natural forces. There is light above and life growing everywhere. The figures are framed, not by a formal arch, but by nothing more than a single spar, some leaves, and a blue sky. There is less control, virtually no containment, more freedom, and a slight threat (the spar may fall and the wall may crumble even more).
The second thing that struck me while I sat looking at this picture is the fact that the artist seems to want us to be very aware of the difference between the two parts, with a suggestion that he wants us to identify with one side rather than the other (or that at least, he himself appears to). Perhaps ‘balance’ is the wrong word. ‘Dissymmetry’ might be better.
For a start, the picture is not divided into equal parts. The right hand side dominates. The woman on the left is looking away from us. We cannot see her face and judge the detail of her humanity. She has no relationship with us or with anyone else. She seems indifferent to the other characters (and they to her). She is dressed in a black top, almost silhouetted, blocking out much of the light. She is facing the regular verticals of a fence, another repeating brick arch, and a black window. She is standing and contemplating and it is almost as if she is soon to walk further away and the black door will shut her off from us forever.
The woman on the right is almost the exact opposite of her counterpart. Her top and hat are white and there is lightness covering part of the wall. We can see her face and humanity. She is larger. She is closer and appears to be walking away from darkness. She looks with tenderness at the child and holds the girl’s hand. Crucially there is relationship and warmth and compassion. There is a wider range of colour on the right than on the left. If the woman is the mother of the child, she has known a sexual union that may probably be threatening to the woman on the left.
One woman is formal and small and dark and walking away into structure and pattern and control. She is alone. The other is larger and bright against the darkness. Her life has more joy and is potentially more chaotic. She is human and in relationship and walking towards the viewer.
And if you ever doubted which one the artist was more attracted to, just look at the floor. Between the viewer and the woman on the left there is a large expanse of brick and hard, dull concrete. Between the viewer and the woman on the left there is a broom angled to lead us in. There is colour in the flower to catch our eye. And the line started by the broom is picked up by the spar and curves towards to the woman.
To me, it felt that freedom was being pitted against control, warmth against coldness, informality against formality, relationship against solitude, love against loneliness, life against a living form of death. The artist appears to be presenting us with a black and white choice.
As I read more about the picture I began to relate to it at a much deeper emotional level. The key for me was discovering the wording above the arch on the left. The inscription reads (dit.is.in.sin)te.hyronimusdale / wil(dt.v.tot.patie)ntie[en.lijdt] tsamenhey(t) / begheven w(and)t.w(ij).mu(ette)n / eerst dalle / willen wijlle wy w(o)rden / verheven anno 1614. (This is in Saint Jerome’s vale, if you wish to repair to patience and meekness. For we must first descend if we wish to be raised.) The left door leads to some religious institution. Humanity must subjugate itself in order to be raised at some future stage. Things and people have to be shut away. The woman and the child are walking away.
Of course, as a metaphor for the change that had taken place in me, the picture is far too simplistic. When I had my Christian faith I enjoyed times of intimate relationship with others, whether praying with people, worshipping with them, or weeping with them in pastoral situations. But there was always a divide from the others outside the faith, always a separation in some profound way. What is true is that there were always rules, always a humanity that had to be subjugated, always a sense that there was something threatening about to break out that had to be controlled and kept in its place. There was always worry, always threat.
I love the organic nature of the right that is even spreading over parts of the left. I have experienced a real sense of joy and challenge of ‘blue sky thinking’. Things have to be worked out and adapted rather than be ordained or fixed. Growth is taking place slowly and ideas are developing in tentative and sometimes awkward ways.
I feel at home in this slightly ramshackle, but warm and colourful and profoundly human world.
Thanks for sharing this painting and your interpretation. I love what you had to say about what it means to you.
I’m a musician and, unfortunately, have never studied the visual arts in any depth. I’ve gotten into photography in recent years, which has made me much more visually aware of my environment. Now I notice things like light, pattern, shape and color. I always enjoyed nature before, but I think trying to look with the eyes of a photographer has deepened my sensitivity to the world around me. Perhaps this is some of what art has done for you.
I too have taken up photography again in recent years. Learning about that has helped me gain the confidence to seriously look at other art work. In learning how to begin to make sense of what I like in a photograph, I have begun to feel that the art world need not always be threatening to me.
Gosh! I am deeply moved and stunned by this. I am also very excited too. I read in Steve Covey’s book yesterday- I am being encouraged to finally read “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” that part of growth and education is to know and acknowledge your ignorance. I have loved art most of my life but I have been ignorant in looking and interpreting.
A quick glance of the picture and I had picked up virtually nothing of what you have explained so beautifully and eloquently.
I can see how this spoke to you and how liberating it must have felt. I can almost feel the joy and the peace.
I think the next time I visit a art gallery the glasses will be on and perhaps I might see things in a whole new way.
Thanks for this. The fog may be lifting. One of your best blogs yet to date.
I have just had to go back and look more. The lady on the left, even though we can’t see her face suggests to me she is regal and beautiful. Posssibly younger. Yet the lady on the right has a long nose and is not ouwardly perhaps as beautiful. But she has the relationship, the child clearly loves her and her beauty is from within. Looks can therefore not say what lies beneath a heart or win a relationship.
The concrete stone floor seems cold as the women’s(left) personality. I like the evenness of the brick work to the right, is does suggest stability even if there is greater fluidity and change within that persons life and her child.
Fascinating stuff!
Mmmm. Not convinced myself about the regal beauty on the left, but then it doesn’t fit in with my preconceptions. If she is regal and beautiful I would have to interpret it as formal and restrained rather than spontaneous and passionate!
Looking at the picture and reading athinkingman’s comments about it, I’m reminded again of the fact that making art, which most people tend to think of as a singular, private endeavor, is really a communal act. The artist may have one purpose in mind, but successive viewers reconstruct and reinterpret the work according to their own visions and needs.
For myself looking at this work, I tend to see it not so much as a contrast of two different lifestyles and/or philosophies as a depiction of two aspects of the human experience: the outward ‘real’ world of relationships and shared experience, which tends to be messy and colorful and diverse and organic; and the inner world of the soul which encompasses all of those things inside ourselves that are invisible to the outside world and may always be mysterious and unattainable — ideals, dreams, fears, all the things that make us individuals. Note the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ in the left-hand image, and the fact that the woman is turned mostly away from the viewer and toward this inner light. (Unfortunately my monitor is not the best so I know I’m missing many details.)
From a religious standpoint, it’s interesting that this more religiously-oriented part of the picture is on the left side of the painting, not the right. I wonder what scholars have to say about that.
I’m also reminded of how different the experience of art is now from in this artist’s time. How different it is to look at a Rothko, say, or a Bridget Riley! The things artist and viewer are reaching for in our time, and the tools required to access these works, are a world apart from those of the 1600s; and yet, people centuries from now will God willing still be plumbing the depths of our modern works and ‘remaking’ them in their own images.
Thanks for your comments trailOfcrumbs. An interesting reading. It is fascinating to learn about the variety of meanings we create in response to works of art.
Had to comment more about this picture, as I had my face less than five cms away from it today.
The picture, in the flesh, is absolutely beautiful. This picture you have illustrated is very fine indeed but can never really do the original real justice.
I want to retract one statement about the women on the left. She does not look regal and beautiful, her facial contours look severe and coarse.
The lady with the child has a high forehead but she has a soft, kind, face and loving, feeling look.
The stone work was wondrous in colour. Like a carpet of tapestry and texture. The old stone wall was so georgous and looked old.
The broom was exquisite in detail, its soft bristles and fine detail. The foliage alongside it was soft and authentic in colour.
I would like to be on the right hand side of the picture, that is for sure.
Like two different paintings in one frame. The strokes of the brush looked different from right to left.
I can see why you were moved.
I stood and looked for a good while.
[...] It was then that I saw my first and only unidentified flying object. People far more perceptive than I am have talked in the past about having an epiphany. Well, this was one of mine (for another of mine, see Making Sense). [...]