Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Pieter de Hooch
Dutch; 17th-century
St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts
74%
Brothel Scene. c1675-80. Oil on canvas
There are paintings by de Hooch that are better than this one "as paintings," but conceptually it gets the aesthetic job done fairly well. By this I mean to say that there's something lacking in the colors (the overall orange tone is a like a film atop the image) and the massing (the painting's top half is unjustifiably barren) and the two figure groups (they're both a little centerless and overdefined), but then what's missing is mostly made up for by the open-ended musing about the possibilities of picturing that the picture performs. The two windows at the back are like discrete pictures, as are both of the two parties of revelers, and there's an actual painting hanging high up on the wall at right. Each of these different scenes-within-the-scene is equivocal about the claims it would make on the others as to significance and priority, but it's also clear that they're all somehow interacting with each other, and that this ambiguous interaction is the engine of the painting's effects. Look at how the mistress is walking along that tiled orthogonal towards both the picture plane and the couple, or at how that prurient dog yokes the fore- and background scenes together. (TFS, 2026)