Vermeer's Delft Today: The House of Pieter de Hoogh
Although a number of seventeenth century Delft facades have been handed down to us, if we attempt to identify a particular historical location, we must remember that in Vermeer's time houses had no numbers, but were usually distinguished by names according to signs hung outside a house or business or a given activity that went on inside which was common knowledge to Delft's citizens (i.e the Three Hammers at the house at Beestenmarkt where Vermeer's father Reynier grew up). Houses began to given civic numbers only when Napoleon's brother Louis Bonaparte became king of the short-lived Kingdom of Holland in 1806. This often makes an exact location of a particular building difficult to ascertain, sometimes impossible. However, enough historical documentation have survived (the Delft Municipal Archive houses historical maps, books and protocols) which let us make in many cases reasonable comparisons1. Furthermore, thanks to Delft's location between Oude Delft canal and the river Schie divided by a number of smaller canals (grachten), Delft's city plan has not very much changed in the course of the centuries. It is still possible to walk through Delft guiding ourselves with a 17th-c. city map. And a surprising number of the street names have remained the same. In addition, numerous modern archaeological investigations have revealed sections of old foundation walls, cellars, graveyards or filled-up canals, which make possible a correct location or sometimes a rough reconstruction of the floor plan of some former convent or public house. Luckily, small details (a commemorative plaque or stone, a historic inscription, sculpture or sign at a house) have survived providing us with further clues.
Oude Delft 161
An inscribed tablet which appears in Pieter de Hoogh's Courtyard of a House in Delft is one such instance. De Hoogh lived and worked in Delft from c. 1652 to 1660. At first he lived in the household of his patron Justus de la Grange, at the present Oude Delft 161 and later he lived next to the former St. Hieronymus convent, once situated between Oude Delft and Westvest (area of present Oude Delft 147-161). "The original stone with the inscription over the passageway in De Hoogh's charming picture closely resembles one commemorating the long-destroyed Augustinian Monastery of St. Hieronymous in Delft (fire, I536), affixed in De Hoogh's day, to a garden wall in the fashionable neighborhood erected over the complex's remains."3 This tablet still exists and is housed in the Delft Gemeente Musea, Museum Het Prinsenhof and a replica is inserted over the entrance to Oude Delft 161.
"Foliage partially obscures the tablet in the painting but several scholars have made the following translation based on the original inscription: 'This is St. Jeronme's vale, if you wish to repair to patience and meekness. For we must first descend if we wished to be raise.' The reader is thus advised to be humble in life if he or she wants to rise in spirits and standing."4
- Only from the Napoleonic era onwards maps were produced by scientific methods. Some of the earlier maps of Delft show fewer building that eistic and Thematic Evolution, New Haven/London, 2004, p. 165
- Kees Kaldenbach, Delft Artists and Patrons , http://www.xs4all.nl/~kalden/
- ibid. Franits
- xisted.
- Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Style
De Hoogh in Delft
Hoogh was born near Rotterdam and was a pupil of Berchem, probably in Haarlem. De Hoogh arrived in Delft before 1652, joining Justus' household on Oude Delft number 161 as painter and servant (dienaar). Justus had residences in Leiden, Delft and around The Hague. The term servant may imply that De Hoogh exchanged paintings for receiving room and board. In an inventory of Justus la Grange paintings of 1655 there were 66 paintings, of which 4 by Lievens and 11 by De Hooch. By that year Justus was close to financial ruin.2
Around 1667 he moved to Amsterdam and the quality of his work – attempts to depict fashionable society in luxurious surroundings – declined sharply.
De Hoogh worked mainly in Delft, where he seems to have influenced Vermeer, though his colours are warmer and softer than Vermeer's silvery tones. It was during this Delft period that he painted his interiors, favouring two or three figures in a domestic setting, and also his courtyard and garden scenes. All these pictures are characterized by a sensitive rendering of space, light and atmosphere, and a clarity and precision that gives them an untroubled stillness and order.
Oude Delft 161
Inner Courtyard of a House
on the Oude Delf
. Pieter de Hoogh,1658.
National Gallery London.
