RKD STUDIES

As we have seen, Samuel van Hoogstraten had already been dancing around the theme of the elegant interior with figures, pioneered by Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681), Pieter de Hooch (1629- in/after 1679) and others in the 1650s, in various experimental works soon after his return to Dordrecht. The fashion prevailed through the 1660s, and in or around the year 1670 Van Hoogstraten finally took up the challenge head-on, producing at least eight such scenes in a short period of time. The relationship between these paintings has hitherto not been clarified and calls for an extended analysis. The starting point is the most famous example, the Interior with a sick woman and a doctor in the Rijksmuseum, likely the earliest of these paintings [50]. It takes up the well-established theme of the Doctor’s visit, but does not appear to respond to a specific work, as was the case with The slippers. With an extensive and lovingly rendered setting, complete with a striking view into another windowed room up some stairs and further back, Van Hoogstraten clearly sought to outdo the artists who had already enjoyed success with the theme such as Jan Steen (1626-1679), Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667), and Frans van Mieris (I) (1635-1681).¹ At the same time he also shifted the emphasis from the comic play of hidden love, to the challenge of perception and recognition, paralleling his pursuit of the art of painting in general. For this reason, as Celeste Brusati has pointed out, he even included a few studious figures from Raphael’s (1483-1520) School of Athens in the painting hanging from the wall all the way in the back.² He did not incorporate new Flemish stylistic elements, such as surface in his portraiture, but adhered to the solid and clear illusionistic manner he had been developing since his triumph in Vienna in the summer of 1651. He did introduce brighter colours and displays of reflective satin fabric, significant components of the fashion for elegant interiors.

For the presumed companion piece of the Interior with a sick woman and a doctor, Van Hoogstraten went a step further, by wittily pairing it with a rendering of a young woman with a baby in a cradle, accompanied by an older woman, likely meant to be her mother [51]. This scene quite directly refers to the paintings of mothers by cradles by Pieter de Hooch.³ It is dated 1670, and the set of paintings can be traced back to the Pauw-Van der Meer collection, which suggests that it was a commission that preceded the 1671 portraits of the various family members. A symmetrical arrangement of the two genre pieces, perhaps on either side of a fireplace, would have suited the rising classicist taste in interior architecture.

Van Hoogstraten followed up with a second pair of ‘before and after’ paintings that likewise centres on a young woman’s transition to motherhood. The Interior with a woman and a dog in the Dordrechts Museum corresponds closely in dimensions to the Interior with a woman sitting next to a child in a cradle in Hannover, and in the presentation of the female figure, who confronts the viewer with a direct and assured stare, rhetorically prompting them to consider the moral message in the work [52][53]. The dog caressed by the woman symbolizes fidelity, so that we can probably interpret the painting behind her on the wall - which appears to depict Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:11-22) - as an ode to faithfulness to a husband or fiancée away on travels. Stylistically, Van Hoogstraten took a step further in these works in infusing his realism with a sense of elegance, with the elongated proportions of the female figure, her slightly smaller and longer head, and a longer neck. He was clearly taking further bold steps, including new experimentation with colour. In the pure, bright reds and yellows in the costume and furniture, Van Hoogstraten detached from the regime of broken and complimentary ‘friendly’ colours he had adopted under Rembrandt. The Hannover painting goes another step further, introducing a striking purplish hue for the curtain. This allows us tentatively to place this pair slightly later than the set that is now divided between Springfield and Amsterdam, with its more restrained palette.

Similarly flamboyant use of colour resurfaces in a maternal scene in a private collection in Tokyo [54]. The figural arrangement in the foreground is complemented by a view into a room in the left background, with large windows revealing a neat copse of trees and brick houses outside, set against open sky - again demonstrating a wide range of mastery. In addition to bright yellow and red, and the purple hue familiar from the abovementioned Dordrecht painting, the woman wears a shawl lined with a striking pure blue fabric. This subtle chromatic note, unusual for the artist until now, is also distributed in more subtle mixtures in the folds of white fabric in her costume and in the cradle’s sheets. The addition of this colour strongly suggests a stepwise progression for Van Hoogstraten, in incorporating pure colours into his compositions, moving even further away from Rembrandt. This alternative use of colour even receives separate attention in his treatise: a pure gathering together of harmonizing powers: the apt arrangement of colours, which we call the art of garlanding [tuilkonst].⁴ Echoed in a mythological scene of Venus and Adonis, it forms an extreme point in the stylistic development in his oeuvre [56]. We do not see further application or expansion in his work: these paintings appear to mark a caesura in Van Hoogstraten’s activity as an experimental and researching artist, in general.

Van Hoogstraten produced a number of similar depictions of young women in domestic interiors, with or without children, often combining elements from the works mentioned above. Interior with a woman sitting next to a child in a cradle, formerly with Lord Dysart, closely echoes the composition in Tokyo, but instead of the sunlit room to the left it incorporates the arched doorway from the Dordrecht painting [54][55]. The fireplace in the background in Dordrecht resurfaces behind the young mother in a painting last recorded with the collector Victor Doat in Paris in 1883. As we only have black-and-white photos for these untraced works, further analysis is hindered. This type of paintings was likely aimed at a more modest clientele, or the open market. One can only speculate on whether this shift in format accompanied the artist’s return to Dordrecht in 1671. The production of variations on a fixed theme echoes the various letterboards Van Hoogstraten painted through the decades, with many repeated elements, but all different from each other. Looking at the overall chronology, these interiors evidently replaced the letterboards in his artistic output.

50
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Interior with a sick woman and a doctor, c. 1670
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv./cat.nr. SK-C-152

51
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Interior with two women looking at a child in a cradle, dated 1670
Springfield (Massachusetts), Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, inv./cat.nr. 52/02

52
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Interior with a woman and a dog, c. 1671
Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, inv./cat.nr. DM/994/730

53
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Interior with a woman sitting next to a child in a cradle, c. 1671
Hannover, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, inv./cat.nr. PAM 984

56
attributed to Samuel van Hoogstraten
Venus and Adonis, ca. 1671
Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum