Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 1, 1908.djvu/496

 472 PIETER DE HOOCH SECT. sion at Delft on October 12, 1654. De Hooch must certainly have seen Fabritius's masterpiece, the " Landsknecht," now at Schwerin. He painted the scene of ruin caused by the explosion. Whether De Hooch learned more from Vermeer than Vermeer learned from him, is a question that it is difficult to answer. Both men showed a common preference for effects of strong sunlight and of daylight falling into an interior. Pieter de Hooch combines this effect in most cases with a vista of a second room illumined by a warm ray of light, whether the front room is equally well lighted or not. Vermeer, on the contrary, places his figures against a strongly lighted wall, and as a rule does not introduce a vista. Pieter de Hooch has a greater talent for composition, and does not shrink from introducing numerous figures into his pictures, whereas the majority of Vermeer's pictures contain only one figure, or two at most. The two men differ also in their figure-drawing and in their schemes of colour. Vermeer prefers the cooler tones of blue and green with yellow, and abstains almost entirely from the use of a strong warm red. Pieter de Hooch, on the other hand, charms us by combining this red with black, white, and yellow. It would seem as if the contact with Vermeer at Delft had a refining influence on the work of Pieter de Hooch. For the decline of his art is almost contemporaneous with his removal to Amsterdam. The pictures which he painted during the last ten years of his career are only feeble copies of the splendid creations of his Delft period. The effects of light become exaggerated and untrue, and often impossible. His figure-drawing becomes weaker, his execution superficial and unattractive. The blue half-tones on the flesh often spoil the effect ; the vermilion on the lips and elsewhere is put on in accordance with a formula. While the pictures of his prime illustrated simple middle-class life and domestic scenes in homely surroundings, his later works show scenes from high society in large and magnificent saloons, such as, in reality, 'were scarcely to be found in Holland. These private interiors were, in fact, adapted from the new Amsterdam Town Hall, and the rich merchant is shown at music in halls which are copied from Raphael's " School of Athens." Pictures of this kind fill the period from 1667 to 1677, to which year the last dated picture by De Hooch belongs. If we may judge from the costumes, a few of his pictures were painted still later, but De Hooch probably died soon after 1677. His best works, most of which are in England and America, are among the most popular and most valuable, from a com- mercial standpoint, of the productions of the Dutch school of painting. SCHOLARS AND IMITATORS OF PIETER DE HOOCH As it is not always easy to say whether a painter imitated Vermeer or De Hooch, the imitators of both masters are here noticed together. Neither had any pupils in the literal sense. If it be true that JACOBUS OCHTERVELT (who was born before 1635, and died before 1700) was a fellow-pupil of De Hooch's under Berchem,