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www.privateairny.com Private Air | Winter 2021/2022 64 bordering, touching, overlapping, the big compositional drama seems to be this relationship between head and map. When the head is outside, it is framed against a white wall. When it is touching, it is marriage of ideas of brain and diagram, when the head overlaps the map, it is plunged into its virtual space and overwhelmed. ese are the great narrative dramas of his heads. Of course, there is tonality, color and shape and a supreme elegance. But the stark modern Vermeer we know is much more the Pieter de Hooch Vermeer than we knew, interested in the harmonies between figure and geometry, between the painted geometry and the real shape and edge of the canvas. e map was the great craft of 17th century Holland, assisted by their mastery of the seas and far travel and commercial exchange, and an engraving tradition which began in Antwerp a century before. Maps are metaphors for the world, of vast space, of being somewhere else. ey are a metaphor for painting itself, a flat surface with vastness within, a charting and journey for the eyes. A map within a picture was then a double metaphor. If we compare this 1664 dated PDH picture with this Vermeer often placed around that time, we see both artists dividing the canvas into quarters and using the tension from the corner of map or window against the head. is creates a psychological tension of the human and geometry. is solitary figure is very unusual for De Hooch (and repeated most famously in the pendants of both artists of women holding balances). It may have been a commentary on the losses of one of his children, Fransois and his mother-in-law, Diewerte who had recently died and left the house palpably empty. e bubonic plague hit the Netherlands again in the mid 1660s and wiped out 10%(24,000) of the population of Amsterdam. Both artists also used undoubtedly their wives and children as models. is was the foundation of Dutch genre painting- depicting one's own everyday life. Vermeer apparently seemed to switch painting each of two of his children towards the end of his life. e famous girl with a pearl earring may be his daughter Maria who married the son of a prosperous merchant in 1674 after her father died. e other daughter, possibly Elisabeth, who was less attractive and had features that resemble someone with Down's syndrome got equal time in his canvases. He appeared to paint one and then the other and then occasionally both together for the final third of his extant work. More than Pieter's household, Vermeer's wife, who was a practicing Catholic, had children almost every year of their marriage. His household must have been filled with a continuous din of children crying, playing and some, unfortunately, dying. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Vermeer sought the solitude of his upstairs studio where he could escape from the throngs of his offspring and paint the simple quietude of women absorbed in their daily tasks, undisturbed. Vermeer in fact depicted young children only twice in his work-his two landscapes- and they acted as small minor details in the broader composition. PDH had a more manageable population in his household and perhaps it was easier for him to focus on the relationships between mother and child. Budapest Museum of Art Metropolitan Museum of Art Mauritshuis National Gallery, London Kenwood, London Metropolitan Museum of Art ART

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