Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House

Light falls through an open doorway into a tiled entrance hall, where a man hands a letter to a woman — the courtship theme that Pieter de Hooch repeated with variations throughout his career. He painted this Amsterdam scene in 1670, after moving from Delft in the early 1660s and turning from the simple courtyards of his early years toward richer, more elegant interiors. The play of daylight across the architecture shows the heightened refinement of those later Amsterdam pictures.