Scrubbing Away Sin: Reconciling Faith and Fortune in Pieter de Hooch Paintings

Joannah Otis

Georgetown University

Abstract

Seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age artist Pieter de Hooch spent the majority of his career painting domestic scenes in the great houses of Amsterdam’s elite. His detailed brushwork and strategic light sources show a vastly wealthy society beyond the city’s bustling canals. Yet the Asian porcelain and gold decorations depicted in the paintings are countered by the crucifixes and religious tableaus of devout Calvinists. The Dutch were well aware of this conflict between their worldly success and the strict anti-materialistic tenets of Calvinism. De Hooch’s paintings reveal how upper-class Dutchwomen reconciled this conflict of interests, primarily by fastidiously cleaning their homes in an effort to cleanse their souls and those of their families.

Scrubbing Away Sin:
Reconciling Faith and Fortune in Pieter de Hooch’s Paintings

The incredible wealth amassed by Dutch merchants and investors throughout the seventeenth century enabled local art markets to flourish and created an ideal environment for the production of Golden Age art.^[1] Pieter de Hooch was among those artists who established themselves as genre painters. The work he produced during his time in Delft and Amsterdam illustrates a well-documented, church-endorsed attention to cleanliness.^[2] Religious imagery, representations of domestic responsibility, and gleaming surfaces in de Hooch’s paintings reveal how cleanliness enabled Dutch elites to reconcile economic success with their conservative Calvinist beliefs.

Religion, economics, and cleanliness appear perhaps most clearly in de Hooch’s Mother and Child with a Serving Woman Sweeping (Fig. 1). Unlike contemporaries such as Frans Van Mieris or Johannes Vermeer, de Hooch never gained enough popularity to garner consistent patrons.^[3] His canvases tended to depict universally relatable and recognizable subjects that would have attracted the average art buyer, as opposed to scenes commissioned and created under the direction of patrons. The two women in Mother and Child with a Serving Woman Sweeping are thus generic figures who emphasize important moral values rather than individual characteristics. Their respective places within the home echo manuals on proper comportment circulated in seventeenth-century Holland. Jacob Cats’s Houwelick (Marriage) was the most popular moralizing guide among literate upper-class women, selling fifty thousand copies in the twenty years after its publication.^[4] The manual specifies women’s responsibilities from maidenhood through widowhood with an emphasis on domestic competence.^[5] Cats’s ideals are mirrored in many of de Hooch’s genre paintings, which suggests the theme’s popularity.^[6]

Darker tones on the left side of Mother and Child with a Serving Woman Sweeping foreground the divinely lit mother. A gilt frame above her head shows Christ’s Deposition, in which Christ is carefully removed from the cross following crucifixion. The presence of both the ornate frame and its content is unusual, given Calvinism’s disapproval of religious iconography and excess. Nonetheless, Christ’s image alludes to faith and emphasizes the role of religion in Dutch family life.^[7] Less unusual is de Hooch’s portrayal of a nursing housewife. Motherhood was lauded as a divine chore in the Dutch Republic, and children were regarded with particular fondness.^[8] The position of de Hooch’s mother echoes this belief. She sits directly beneath the mourning Mary, and her doting body language is reminiscent of the Virgin’s in a Pietà scene. The newborn further foreshadows Christ’s resurrection by symbolically embodying new life. Yet de Hooch’s housewife is firmly grounded in the domestic sphere, whereas the Virgin is merely a few paint strokes standing in for a spiritual figure. This separation between earthly mother and Holy Mother of God is a reminder of human mortality and the faith good Calvinists were expected to uphold. Such associations would have appealed to wealthy wives seeking to justify their own privilege. In his Commentary on Genesis, theologian John Calvin warned, “Let those who abound remember, that they are surrounded with thorns and must take care lest they be pricked.”^[9]

The Dutch were undoubtedly living among thorny roses by the seventeenth century. Per capita income soared above that of any other European nation, and Amsterdam became the unequivocal center of European commerce.^[10] Formal separation from Spain in 1648 with the Treaty of Münster ensured open access to foreign ports, which allowed the Dutch East and West India Companies to command monopolies on everything from Baltic grain to Swedish iron.^[11] At the helm of Dutch capitalism were Amsterdam’s regents, who controlled the city’s economy and politics with absolute power.^[12] A majority of their wealth can be traced to trade investments, or to taxes collected from merchants and trading companies. Capitalism was deeply entrenched in upper-class Dutch life, and few were uninvolved in the lucrative business.

Mother and Child with a Serving Woman Sweeping is a visual manifesto of Holland’s incredible wealth; an ornate fireplace, decorative wooden chair, and large windows command more space than the figures themselves. The maid’s presence indicates a degree of financial security; only eighteen percent of Dutch homes employed live-in help. These servants, mostly unmarried women, flocked from nearby countries and rural farms to Dutch urban centers.^[13] Extensive art collections were likewise limited to the upper class, although two-thirds of Delft households owned at least one small print by the mid-seventeenth century.^[14] The three sizeable paintings behind de Hooch’s mother and maid likely represent a fragment of the household’s collection. Wealthy families regularly owned more than fifty paintings of differing subjects and values. It was not unusual for a piece of work by Van Mieris to appear in the same house as an unsigned painting purchased at a local fair. Landscapes, portraits, genre scenes, and historical paintings were created en masse as artists took advantage of the flush economy.^[15]

Little is known about de Hooch’s personal finances, except that his income was consistently below six hundred guilders when he lived in Amsterdam.^[16] The few existing records of de Hooch’s life indicate that he never achieved much acclaim or professional success. His paintings regularly sold for fifteen to seventy-five guilders, while works by well-known individuals such as Gerrit Dou went for over one thousand. Adjusted for inflation, one thousand guilders would be enough to buy an American home in 2007.^[17] City records indicate that the addresses de Hooch occupied with his wife and children were situated in working-class neighborhoods on Amsterdam’s outskirts.^[18] The rich genre scenes he produced were thus in stark contrast to his own living conditions.

Servitude and subservience are central to Mother and Child with a Serving Woman Sweeping. Although the maid occupies a prominent place in the foreground, she is set to one side and cloaked in shadow. Close inspection reveals that she labors at a pristine wooden floor; cleanliness was understood as an indication of spiritual purity.^[19] It was homeowners rather than their maids, however, who held claim to a clean conscience: middle- and upper-class Dutch people widely believed that maids were slovenly beings whose chores had to be monitored by a watchful mistress. The housewife assumed responsibility for cleanliness because maids could not be expected to hold such high standards.^[20]

Perhaps the most notable observations on Dutch cleanliness were written by Sir William Temple, English Ambassador to the Dutch Republic from 1668 to 1672 and from 1674 to 1679. An excerpt from his book, Observation upon the United Republic of the Netherlands, demonstrates how foreigners interpreted the cleaning craze:

The extreme moisture of the Air, I take to be the occasion of the great neatness in their Houses, and cleanliness in their Towns. For without the help of those Customs, their Country would not be habitable by such Crowds of people . . . The same moisture of Air makes all Metals apt to rust, and Wood to mould; which forces them by continual pains of rubbing and scouring, to seek a prevention or cure: This makes the brightness and cleanness that seems affected in their Houses, and is call’d natural to them, by people who think no further.^[21]

While the Dutch climate may have necessitated cleaning, Temple’s description fails to clarify why the residents of similarly damp cities in Germany and northern France were not equally fastidious. One potential explanation comes from the Reformed Church, which was the Dutch Republic’s official religious institution following separation from Catholic Spain in the sixteenth century. Calvinist doctrine dictated that houses remain spotless to nurture the soul’s purity. Cleanliness was also regarded as a form of patriotism, and sweeping away dirt thus became a symbolic gesture against polluted, uncivilized invaders. Those who dared mar the canals or streets were accused of aiding the civic enemy.^[22] Religious and social stakes were high enough to ensure cleanliness both inside and outside the home.

Privileged wives were unlikely to sweep the floors, but they did maintain firm control over the household linens; servants were almost always associated with disreputability, and linen was a particularly prized commodity. De Hooch’s Two Women Beside a Linen Closet shows a mother preparing her daughter for the responsibilities of marriage (Fig. 2).^[23] Both wear the silk skirts and fur jaks specific to wealthy Dutch women.^[24] While the older figure is framed by the closet, her younger companion stands closer to the doorway through which she would exit upon marriage. Only the young girl playing kolf in the doorway has direct access to the canals beyond; her older companions are held inside by the expectations of womanhood.^[25] The doorway scene, or doorkijkje, was a popular Dutch compositional device used to provide additional commentary beyond the foreground. The three female figures set against de Hooch’s doorways illustrate almost an entire lifetime. Taken metaphorically, the painting reflects on the transience of time and the importance of household responsibilities to a successful marriage.

The quality and quantity of linen in a family’s home were reliable measures of wealth in baroque Holland.^[26] The sizeable pile of sheets in Two Women Beside a Linen Closet suggests a family of prominence, and a centrally placed laundry hamper reiterates the never-ending nature of housework.^[27] A lock and key on the left-hand closet door further emphasize how valuable imported linen had become. While the freshly laundered sheets in Two Women Beside a Linen Closet offer insight into material wealth and maternal responsibilities, the surrounding room reveals a preoccupation with cleanliness. Gleaming marble floors extend from the inner room to the voorhuis, or reception area. Both the windows and the linen closet have a shine that could only come from constant attention. De Hooch’s manipulation of light lends these objects a radiant, divine quality similar to that in Mother and Child with a Serving Woman Sweeping.

The rectangular gilded frame hung above the doorway in Two Women Beside a Linen Closet bears a strong resemblance to the gold frame painted two years later in Mother and Child with a Serving Woman Sweeping. The earlier frame, however, is partially obscured by a statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa.^[28] Even if the women beneath the statue were not Calvinist, the pagan figure would still stand in contrast with whatever faith they practiced. The Dutch Republic leniently permitted its citizens to follow other Christian and Jewish traditions in private, but paganism was not among the accepted faiths.^[29] It is more likely that the Perseus statue was intended to symbolize worldliness and material success. The Dutch East India Company’s control of Mediterranean trade would have facilitated the statue’s arrival in Amsterdam and consequent acquisition by a family wealthy enough to afford imported art.

Perseus’s presence is an anomaly, and there is little reason to believe that similar statues regularly appeared in upper-class homes. The majority of Dutch genre painters worked from props in their own studios, rather than from life.^[30] As a result, genre paintings cannot be taken at face value as completely accurate depictions of Dutch homes. Genre painters frequently dismissed reality in favor of painting visually appealing surfaces, such as marble floors, to flaunt their own abilities and appeal to customers who might appreciate finer details.^[31]

De Hooch’s deft brushwork further blurs the line between fiction and reality in Two Women Beside a Linen Closet. A divine power is inherent in the gloss of the marble floors, which would have required consistent mopping to reflect light so strongly. The Dutch took great pains to maintain clean floors and tended to wear soft slippers inside. Temple’s Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands recounts the story of a visiting gentleman whose shoes were yanked off and replaced with slippers after a household maid spied dirt on them.^[32] De Hooch’s linen-bearer wears slippers as well, one of which peeks out from beneath her skirt. Small details such as this one contribute to a convincing painting, as they gesture toward reality without presuming to copy it literally.

Among de Hooch’s earliest experiments with genre painting was The Bedroom, which the artist completed in 1658 during his Delft period (Fig. 3). A young mother folds linen beside her bed as her child cheekily gazes upward. Again, the doorkijkje composition draws the eye back in space toward a cluster of bushes. While marble and ornate cupboards feature heavily in later genre scenes, this interior has a red-tiled floor and simple furniture. The mother appears to have taken charge of everything from the sheets in her hands to the chamber pot on the floor; there is no maid in sight. This is evidently a middle-class household overseen and cleaned by the housewife alone.

Though The Bedroom lacks the extreme attention to detail evident in later de Hooch paintings, it demonstrates how cleanliness resonated across socioeconomic strata. A woman of modest means attended to the linens in the same way her wealthier contemporaries did, albeit without a silk skirt or fur jak. Housewives of the middle and upper classes were expected to take responsibility for the cleanliness of their homes. The identities of those who performed the work varied, but the basic tenets of tidiness remained.^[33] Two chairs on either side of The Bedroom’s interior door suggest attention to order and give the composition a pleasing symmetry. De Hooch’s tile floor reflects as much light as the marble in Two Women Beside a Linen Closet. Only the impish-looking child looks out of place, her active stance and flushed cheeks implying a recent trip outdoors. The girl embodies freedom and youthfulness, whereas her mother has succumbed to the housebound responsibilities of womanhood. This interaction is strikingly similar to that of the kolf-playing child and her cupboard-framed elder in Two Women Beside a Linen Closet. Cleanliness may have been an attempt to provide children with a morally pure environment so as to save their souls before the monotony of adulthood.

Woman and Her Maid in a Courtyard offers a similarly harmonious domestic scene with one notable distinction (Fig. 4). The left-hand doorkijkje is occupied by a black-clad male who appears to be walking toward the open courtyard. Neither mistress nor maid notices his approach as the two face each other across a cobbled area studded by bowls, buckets, a mop, and drying fabric. The crouching, wide-eyed maid appears to be in the midst of laundering. Her faceless mistress dispenses some unknown direction; her resolutely turned back at once denies viewers and invites them into the scene. De Hooch renders the approaching figure in much less detail, though his presence is considerably more significant. Few Dutch Golden Age genre scenes include men, primarily because their place was in the public sphere. In Woman and Her Maid in a Courtyard, the man remains literally and figuratively elevated above domestic chores. De Hooch cleverly positions him slightly higher than the women in a trick of perspective that also reflects social hierarchy. His distance from the courtyard indicates a broader cultural expectation that men work outside the home while women manage whatever lies within. Compositional decisions and figural placement thereby separate domesticity from the professional outside world.

De Hooch was hardly alone in exploring representations of cleanliness in seventeenth-century Holland. The popular and successful Gerrit Dou painted a remarkable number of maids attending to domestic chores in orderly kitchens. Both A Maidservant Scouring a Brass Pan at a Window and Maid at the Window feature young women cleaning already-glistening brass pots (Figs. 5 and 6). Gabriel Metsu’s Woman Scouring Pots and Pans in a Niche has an identical subject (Fig. 7). Cleanliness was a popular theme for sought-ought and lesser-known artists, suggesting that the subject must have enjoyed a degree of market popularity.

Nicolaes Maes’s moralizing Idle Servant inverts the idea of cleanliness to instill appreciation for order (Fig. 8). Here, an apron-clad mistress gestures knowingly toward her sleeping maid. Pots and pans litter the kitchen floor, while a cat slinks across the countertop looking for food.^[34] The woman’s direct gaze creates a dialogue with the viewer and elicits pity for her, rather than for the tired servant. Unlike de Hooch’s sunlit work, Maes’s painting is muted by deep shadows; God’s bright presence is altogether absent from the dingy household.

A similar gloominess pervades a tronie produced in Rembrandt’s workshop, perhaps by Carel Fabritius (Fig. 9). Girl with a Broom strongly contrasts with the well-polished women of de Hooch’s paintings. The young subject leans against her broom in the center of the canvas, sullenly staring out of a dusty room. Her overturned pail and the barely visible pool of water in front of her imply unfinished work, or at least the ceaseless demands of cleanliness. Though Girl with a Broom occupies a separate realm from genre painting and de Hooch’s work, the small canvas provides greater perspective on how working girls may have felt about cleanliness.

De Hooch’s genre scenes set an example and reflect Dutch values, but it is doubtful that buyers purchased such paintings as reminders of how to run a household. Church sermons lauding purity and societal expectations circulated by moralists would have ensured attention to cleanliness without an extra hand from artists. Instead, middle-class buyers may have been attracted to the reasonably priced, richly appointed interiors de Hooch created. The realistically painted silk, fur, imported statues, gilded frames, and marble floors could have been appreciated as visual representations of a family’s ambitions. Other clients may have seen themselves reflected in de Hooch’s work. The homely paintings could have been seventeenth-century equivalents of modern-day family photographs. Regardless of how Golden Age Dutchmen interacted with their art, de Hooch’s paintings offered well-liked subjects in settings with familiar, though not necessarily real, objects.

Devout Calvinism coupled with enormous financial success from the booming Golden Age economy prompted Dutch elites to seek reconciliation between their religious beliefs and material circumstances. De Hooch’s gleaming genre scenes, and those of his contemporaries, illustrate interior cleanliness. The maids and housewives complicit in maintaining such cleanliness were kept firmly within the domestic sphere by societal expectations laid out by moral guides. These religiously informed cultural practices were distinct to Dutch culture and studiously noted by foreign visitors. De Hooch’s ability to convincingly render household relationships and responsibilities marks him as one of the seventeenth century’s most astute artists, even if his talents were not recognized at the time.

Endnotes

^[1] Klaske Muizelaar, Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 11.

^[2] Simon Schama, An Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), 3.

^[3] Wayne Franits, Pieter De Hooch: A Woman Preparing Bread and Butter for a Boy (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2007), 67–68.

^[4] Muizelaar, Picturing Men and Women, 16.

^[5] Mariet Westermann, A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic 1585–1718 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 119.

^[6] Peter C. Sutton, Pieter De Hooch, 1629–1684 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 70.

^[7] Franits, Pieter De Hooch, 42.

^[8] Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 482.

^[9] John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, edited and translated by John King, Vol. 1, 1st English ed. (1578), 13:5, 7. https://christian.net/pub/resources/text/m.sion/cvgn1-20.htm.

^[10] Gerard Koot, “The Portrayal of Women in Dutch Art of the Golden Age: Courtship, Marriage, and Old Age,” Images and Illustrated Essays on the History of the Dutch Republic, History Department, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2015, 2, http://www1.umassd.edu/euro/resources/imagesessays/theportrayalofwomenindutchartofthedutchgoldenage.pdf.

^[11] Franits, Pieter De Hooch, 22.

^[12] Muizelaar, Picturing Men and Women, 21, 23, and 25.

^[13] Ronni Baer, Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2015), 196.

^[14] Baer, 89.

^[15] Franits, Pieter De Hooch, 33.

^[16] Muizelaar, Picturing Men and Women, 23.

^[17] Franits, Pieter De Hooch, 67–68.

^[18] Franits, 33.

^[19] Koot, “Portrayal of Women,” 51.

^[20] Wayne Franits, “The Depiction of Servants in Some Paintings by Pieter De Hooch,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 52 (1989): 562.

^[21] Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London: A. Maxwell, 1673), 88.

^[22] Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 378.

^[23] Baer, Class Distinctions, 87.

^[24] Adriaan E. Waiboer, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 60.

^[25] Wayne Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 106.

^[26] Koot, “Portrayal of Women,” 55.

^[27] Baer, Class Distinctions, 195.

^[28] Baer, 196.

^[29] Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 59.

^[30] Westermann, Worldly Art, 73.

^[31] Franits, Paragons of Virtue, 14.

^[32] Temple, Observations, 379.

^[33] Koot, “Portrayal of Women,” 95.

^[34] Franits, Paragons of Virtue, 108.

Author Bio:

Joannah Otis is an undergraduate student at Georgetown University double majoring in Art History and English. She hopes to continue working with art following her graduation in May 2020.

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