The painting is delicate and finished, meant to be seen from near at hand.  It is always the room that interests him, as much as the people in it.  The painting of the window with its little coats of arms, transparent yet diffusing the light, is exquisitely done.  A chair with the cushion upon it, just like that, occurs again and again in his pictures, the cushion being used as a welcome bit of colour in the scheme.  Most of all, the floors, whether paved with stone as in this picture, or with brick as in the courtyards, are painted with the delightful precise care that the Van Eycks gave to their accessories.  In Peter de Hoogh’s vision of the world there is the same appreciation of the objects of daily use as was displayed by the fifteenth-century Flemish painters whenever their sacred subjects gave them opportunity.  In the seventeenth century it was more congenial to the Flemish and Dutch temperament to paint their own country, and domestic scenes from their own lives, than pictures of devotion.

Other artists besides Peter de Hoogh painted people in their own houses.  In the pictures of Terborch ladies in satin dresses play the spinet and the guitar.  Jan Steen depicted peasants revelling on their holidays or in taverns.  Peter de Hoogh was the painter of middle-class life, and discovered in its circumstances, likewise, abounding romance.

The Dutchman of the seventeenth century loved his house and his garden, and every inch of the country in which he lived, rescued as it had been from invasions by armies and the sea.  Many painters never left Holland, and found beauty enough there to fill well-spent lives in painting its flatness beneath over-arching clear or clouded skies.  Although the earlier Flemings had had a great love of landscape, they had not conceived it as a subject suitable for a whole picture, but only for a background.  In the sixteenth century the figures gradually get smaller and less important, and towards the end of the century disappear.  As the song says, ‘a very different thing by far’ is painting a landscape background and painting a whole landscape picture.  Before the end of the century Rubens painted some wonderful landscapes, and he was soon followed by a great number of very fine landscape painters in Holland.  Cuyp was one of many.

In a Dutch landscape we cannot expect the rich colouring of Italy.  The colouring of Holland is low toned, and tender gradations lead away to the low and level horizon.  The canals are sluggish and grey, and the clouds often heavy and dark.  We saw how the brilliant skies and pearly buildings of Venice made Venetian painters the gayest colourists of the world.  So the Dutch painters took their sober scale of landscape colouring as it was dictated to them by the infinitely varied yet sombre loveliness of their own land.  In the great flat expanses of field, intersected by canals and dotted with windmills, the red brick roof of a water-mill may look ‘loud,’ like an aggressive hat.  But the shadows cast by the clouds change every moment, and in flat country where there is less to arrest the eye the changes of tone are more marked.