Pieter de Hooch, 'A Woman and her Maid in a Courtyard', about 1660/1

It is winter. One or two evergreens are visible, but the tree on the far side of the wall is leafless, as are the espaliered fruit trees growing up against the fence and the vine growing over the roof in the foreground. We seem to be looking at a scene just outside a kitchen – there is an outlet from a sink inside the house to the drain at the bottom of the wall on the right. A maid has brought a steaming cauldron out from the kitchen stove and placed it near the open drain in the courtyard. Apparently obeying her mistress, who stands in front of her, she seems to have taken the fish out of the cooking pot; perhaps she is doing this outside to make it easier to pour away the water.

One of the most appealing aspects of Dutch seventeenth-century painting is the insight it gives us into everyday life, and especially the lives of women. Scenes of ordinary mothers and children or maids and their mistresses at ease in their own homes had hardly been depicted in art before. But in Holland from about the 1640s, the theme became a popular one.

Pieter de Hooch’s paintings are some of the most evocative examples of the genre. We see the women in his paintings working and playing – in gardens and courtyards, as here, and in their living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. These scenes were not necessarily ‘real’; they were often idealised, perhaps offering examples of the sort of virtues required of women who were expected to administer a clean, harmonious household. But they were realistic. Rather than copy a room exactly, the artist might construct one out of familiar elements that seemed authentic to his or her contemporaries.

It seems that de Hooch composed this courtyard scene in just such a way. It was his usual practice. If you look at the far wall, there is a small pavilion or summer house – a portico with an open front supported by double columns. It is leaning against the brickwork, alongside the shed with the steeply sloping roof. The same summer house appears in two other paintings (Portrait of a Family in a Courtyard in Delft in the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna; Woman and Child in a Courtyard in the National Gallery of Art, Washington). The Washington painting has a water pump identical to the one here but in a different position. De Hooch also seems to have used the same broom and pail as models on another occasion; very similar examples feature in his most famous courtyard scene, The Courtyard of a House in Delft.

Another distinctive characteristic of de Hooch’s paintings is the way in which he creates both a realistic sense of space and glimpses of the world beyond the picture. Here, the open door and window on the right hint at the kitchen that we can’t quite see, while two gates standing ajar create a long view down the garden path and through to some steps in the far distance.