Interior with Women beside a Linen Cupboard, Pieter de Hooch
In the Rijskmuseum.
This is another of Pieter de Hooch’s marvelous “keyhole paintings”, in which we are not only invited to enter the painting, but to effectively pass through it — first in the form of the window behind the women, which offers a glimpse of an antechamber, and through that room’s window, a suggestion of sky and buildings beyond — and then through the open door, passing through an entryway, through another open “Dutch door”, its two panels at different angles and a sliver of light visible above its transom, out into the daylight, across a canal and into the half-open door of the house beyond.
We are even invited up the stairs, gently lit from what we might assume is another window above, and the bottoms of which we can see continuing to spiral around and ascend above the painting and statue in the main room.
De Hooch even invites us to linger over a suggestion of the interior of the finely crafted linen cupboard, and adds more interest with the careful rendering of the linen basket and the Delftware bowl on the top of the cupboard.
Eye candy indeed.
