Pieter de Hooch

He was born in Rotterdam in 1629, the eldest of five children. His father was a bricklayer, his mother a midwife. Around 1650 he entered the service of a linen merchant and art collector named Justus de la Grange, working as both painter and servant. The arrangement was common for Dutch painters without independent means: De Hooch accompanied La Grange on trips to The Hague, Leiden and Delft, painting works that went directly into his employer's collection. A later inventory recorded eleven De Hooch paintings in La Grange's possession.

Delft transformed his art. Settling there in the mid-1650s, he began painting quiet domestic interiors flooded with daylight from open doorways: women sweeping, children playing, courtyards glimpsed through sequences of rooms. Art historian Simon Schama has called these works "the first sustained image of parental love that European art has shown us". The paintings of women breastfeeding and caring for children may reflect time spent accompanying his mother on her midwifery rounds. He was a contemporary of Vermeer in the Delft Guild of St Luke, and the two painters shared subjects and sensibilities closely enough that some De Hooch paintings were later reattributed to Vermeer to increase their market price.

He moved to Amsterdam around 1661. His wife died in 1667, at thirty-eight, leaving him with young children. The Amsterdam paintings are darker and more crowded than the Delft work, and critical consensus holds that his best period was behind him.