RKD STUDIES

By the late 1650s, another development in painting had also caught Van Hoogstraten’s eye, one with much further-reaching significance for his oeuvre. Upon return from travels in 1656, he encountered the new fashion for elegant interior scenes, pioneered by artists such as Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681) and Pieter de Hooch (1629- in/after 1679), that had arisen in his absence. In perhaps the best example of the inclination described by , to be provoked by innovations by other artists, and seek to outdo them at their own game, Van Hoogstraten painted one of his most famous works, the Perspective of a Dutch interior viewed from a doorway – also known as The slippers [32].¹ Hanging from the door, a large bunch of keys cheekily allude to the presence of a clavis interpredandi: the painting just above and farther behind it, depicting an elegant woman from behind and her young male servant, which is a version of a famous painting by Ter Borch, known as Interior with a woman reading a letter, a boy waiting on the left, of around 1655 [33]. Van Hoogstraten thus responded to this new development in Dutch painting, but not with his own variation on the elegant interior with figures. Instead, his response is more playful and intellectual: he evokes a narrative simply with objects in association with each other. In doing so he refers back to his great triumph with the illusionistic still life in a shallow space, with cabinet- and niche arrangements of objects, but especially with the letterboard. At the same time, he engages the viewer’s visual perception with his masterful and controlled rendering of spatial relationships, gradually drawing the eye through the depth of the space. Perspective, light, colour, and texture (introducing a slightly agitated surface in the tiles close to us, for instance) are varied and controlled to create a symphonic experience, appealing to the mind as well as the senses.

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attributed to Samuel van Hoogstraten
Perspective of a Dutch interior viewed from a doorway, c. 1655-1660
Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv./cat.nr. R.F. 3722

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studio of Gerard ter Borch (II)
Interior with a woman reading a letter, a boy waiting on the left, dated 1660
Private collection

Not long after this, Van Hoogstraten followed up with another masterwork. His equally famous Peepshow, or perspective box, consists of a rectangular wooden box, with one long side open [34]. All the interior surfaces have been painted to depict the interior of a contemporary Dutch house, with doorkijkjes into to other rooms. The top and ends of the exterior have also been painted, with allegorical scenes referring to the art of painting. As such, it looks ahead to the artist’s treatise of 1678. The overarching theme in both the perspective box and the treatise is the illusionistic rendering of the visible world, and the viewer of the Peepshow could easily compare the result to what they knew from their everyday lives, living in homes looking much like this one. The main twist is that the painterly repertoire Van Hoogstraten applied here was anamorphism, adjusting the shapes and proportions of everything so that it would appear corrected when viewed from a particular vantage point. For this he could not draw as much on his bag of tricks from The slippers and preceding letterboards: raking light, colour, and texture, but relied mainly on the study of distortion. The impulse again appears to be competitive response, this time to the View of Delft with the Nieuwe Kerk and the Vrouwenrecht, by his former fellow pupil Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), completed in 1652 [35]. Recent research has revealed that it too functioned as a perspective box, with a single vantage point.² Van Hoogstraten must have known it, and well even, as he specifically cites such a work by Fabritius in his book.³ He upstaged it not only by making a richer and more complex box, but by making it work with two vantage points, one at either end. Neither The slippers or the Peepshow is dated, but they must have originated in the Dordrecht context, likely around 1658.

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Samuel van Hoogstraten
Perspective box with views of a Dutch interior, c. 1656-1662
London (England), National Gallery (London), inv./cat.nr. NG3832

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Carel Fabritius
View of Delft with the Nieuwe Kerk and the Vrouwenrecht, 1652 (dated)
London (England), National Gallery (London), inv./cat.nr. 3714

During this period Van Hoogstraten also revisited the flat, shallow trompe l’oeil type of still life he had developed in Vienna and cultivated in variations, demonstrating his illusionistic repertoire to audiences and patrons at various locations underway to and from Italy. Only now, in a painting in a private collection, he incorporates a manual of conduct, Den Eerlyken Jongeling, that he had written and published himself in 1657, very likely to mark the occasion of its appearance [36]. In doing so, he refers to himself, instead of to the life of noble Viennese courtiers, and arrives at the type of ‘self-portrait’ letterboard painting for which he would become famous. Van Hoogstraten did return to the shallow cabinet piece as well, regularly, and with references to his own artistic and literary activities and achievements, including the publication of his plays De Roomschen Paulina in 1660 and Dierik en Dorothé in 1666.⁴ In an example of 1663 he also included a miniature painted self-portrait, complete with a frame [37]. This makes explicit the association between his letterboards and Rembrandt’s regular production of self-portraits. He also applied the element of sprong, or variation in height, which he praised in Rembrandt’s Night Watch, to likewise achieve a dynamic, even pulsating quality in the composition.

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Samuel van Hoogstraten
Trompe l'oeil still life of a letter rack with the manuscript of "Den eerlyken jongeling", c. 1657
Private collection

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Samuel van Hoogstraten
Trompe l'oeil still life of a letter rack with self-portrait, dated 1663
Private collection