Die Mutter

The canvas is dated 1663 and is catalogued in Berlin as inventory 820B. It entered the collection in 1876, bought at the Paris auction of the collection of Joseph-Eugène Schneider, the industrialist of Le Creusot. Pieter de Hooch was born in Rotterdam in 1629 and trained in Haarlem with the landscape painter Nicolaes Berchem; he is first recorded in Delft in 1652, married there in 1655 and became a master of the Delft guild of St Luke the same year, and about 1661 he moved to Amsterdam, where the museum records that he died in or after 1679. The households and courtyards he painted in Delft in the 1650s and 1660s are the work on which his reputation rests; he worked there at the same time as Johannes Vermeer, and the two are the names most closely tied to the Dutch interior of that decade. His pictures are held today by the Rijksmuseum, the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. The painting is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.