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www.privateairny.com Private Air | Winter 2021/2022 58 e Card Players and Officer with Laughing Woman ese are the earliest more well know pendant PD/JV works. e brilliance and complexity of each artist's canvas makes whoever came first almost irrelevant. Yet the De Hooch shows an earlier touch in his respective development than Vermeer and very likely predates it. But Officer with a Laughing Woman at the Frick Collection was one the author's favorite paintings growing up as a young artist. e color and tone are extraordinary and the picture sparkles. In the De Hooch, we have two figures at a table playing cards with one raising his arm poised to win the game with an ace. A maid in the back is stuffing a pipe and probably serves the group from the wine jug next to her. e dating around 1659 is supported by several factors: his color palette using red highlights and yellows, the objects including the jug, chair and painting that repeat in the dated 1658 Young Woman Drinking with Two Soldiers at the Louvre. It is likely that this scene takes place in the Both depicted their Dutch home settings in series of pictures with similar compositional interests making them easier to group and compare. ere are many examples throughout the career of both artists of one quoting the other (and many pictures were cross-attributed through the centuries) but while it was thought that Vermeer was the innovator, more evidence suggests that it was De Hooch who was often quoted by Vermeer. Pieter de Hooch was the master composer as evidenced in more than 150 surviving attributed works, full of complexities- while Vermeer's extant oeuvre is 34 and generally similar in composition. Still, Vermeer was the consummate master of technique, of hard and soft edges, sfumato, simplicity of composition, separation clean sparkling light as experienced thru the novel optical devices developed at that time. Pieter de Hooch was the son of a bricklayer, piecing together vast compositions block by block, perhaps a little rustically but creating a special poetry out of a cacophony of pictorial elements. ere is a mutual respect and admiration that is apparent in both artist's works through the Delft years and even after De Hooch moved to Amsterdam. e pictures are the evidence that the two artists must have stayed in touch (or at least seen each other's work).* Let's study individual pairs and try to understand why(until only recently with new scholarship) both artist's works were often confused with the other. e Women with a Child and her Maid and e Procuress 1656 Perhaps the earliest example of who led the charge into "geometric genre painting" is a comparison between PDH's canvas of 1655-6* to Vermeer's 1656 dated picture of the Procuress. Here we see De Hooch's mastery of combining the interior architecture and the figure, of the appearance of his doorkijkje which will appear in almost every subsequent work while Vermeer shows his talent for rendering texture and color and organic composition but shows little of the geometric structures he would soon embrace. Both artists exhibit their interests in organization and rhythmic interplay of limbs and the figures. Vermeer divides his canvas in half horizontally between figures and drapery while De Hooch fractally repeats the canvas boundaries in squares and rectangles within, Mondrian-like. Both would take notice of each other's work and would evolve on a similar trajectory. Collection of the Author Gemaldegalerie Berlin *we can date this fairly accurately after the birth of his first child Pieter in early 1655 ART

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