[Illustration:  AN INTERIOR From the picture by Pieter de Hoogh, in the Wallace Collection, London]

It is a domestic scene that you might witness in any of the old towns of Holland to this day.  The insides and outsides of the houses are still scrubbed with soap and water; rows of clogs stand outside the front doors on muddy days; the women wear the same bright coloured gowns fully gathered round the waist, with the cleanest of white aprons; their faces are placid and unruffled as they pursue the even tenour of their way.

This atmosphere of Dutch life, peaceful, home-loving, and competent, is rendered by Peter de Hoogh in most of his pictures.  It is not the atmosphere of Rembrandt’s art, yet he never could have painted thus except for Rembrandt.  The same love of sunlight and shadows prevailed with Peter de Hoogh, and it was no less the aim of his art to attain mastery over the painting of light, but light diffused and reflected.  He loved to show the sunlight shining through some coloured substance, such as this yellow curtain, which scatters its brightness and lets it fall more evenly throughout the room.  He never painted such extreme contrasts as make manifest Rembrandt’s power.  Rembrandt’s light had been so vivid that it seemed to overwhelm colours in a dazzling brilliancy.  Peter de Hoogh’s lights are just strong enough to reveal the colours in a milder illumination.  In our picture the sunshine diffused by the yellow curtains mingles with the red of the woman’s dress and creates a rich orange.  Little does she know how well her dress looks.  But it was only after incessant study of the way in which Rembrandt had mastered the whole range from light to dark, that Peter de Hoogh became able to paint as he did within his narrower scale, abridged at both extremes.

Begin with the room, then the passage, then the farther hall, then the highway open to the unseen sky above, then the house-front beyond it, and the hall beyond the lady in the neighbouring doorway; there are at least four distinct distances in this picture each differently lighted, and the several effects worked out with scrupulous painstaking fidelity.  It is worth your while, with your own eyes rather than with many words of mine, to search out on the original all these beautifully varied gradations.  In many of his pictures one part is lighted from the sunlit street, and another from a closed court.  Sometimes his figures stand in an open courtyard, whilst behind is a paved passage leading into the house.  All his subjects are of the domestic Dutch life of the seventeenth century, but the arrangement in rooms, passages, courtyards, and enclosed gardens admitted of much variation.  We never feel that the range of subjects is limited, for the light transforms each into a scene of that poetic beauty which it was Peter de Hoogh’s great gift to discern, enjoy, and record.