Private Air New York

www.privateairny.com Private Air | Winter 2021/2022 57 rustic poetry and caress. Vermeer's work embodied eloquence, simplicity, detail, and concentration while De Hooch's oeuvre has a homemade authenticity, a greater variety of elements and a more ambitious harmonization of complexity. It would appear that De Hooch initially inspired Vermeer's focus on juxtaposing geometry and the figure while Vermeer pushed De Hooch towards more refinement. Both artists used their own surroundings and family as the subjects of their work. Vermeer painted his wife and children often as solitary figures absorbed in thought. ey focused on simple daily activities set against the interior geometry, often overlaid with religious metaphor. Against the more Calvinist setting of the Dutch Republic, Vermeer converted to Catholicism to marry his wife and primary painting subject, Catharina Bolnes. De Hooch portrayed a more humanistic world, depicting the harmony of human relationships within his geometric interiors, also using his wife, children and friends. Sometimes their presences emanated outward towards us filling the space; sometimes they were confined to within, similar to Vermeer. is was the Age of the Seen and to bridge the gap between pictorial representation and the actual world, artists in the 17th century often depicted curtains and frames as a middle step between outside and inside. Avoiding this device most of the time, PDH and subsequently Vermeer adopted the repeating rectangle idea into their pictorial worlds, a picture in a picture, echoing the outside boundaries of the canvas in a more eloquent way; a harmonious interface of real and painted edge. Geometry was metaphor in painting. In the previous centuries, its idealized forms were associated with the religious via the cross or church interior, juxtaposed with the organic twisted or scurrying figures therein. In the emancipated Golden Age, however, geometry was transformed into the edges of the Dutch home, while still retaining a symbolic component. De Hooch used his rectangular doorkijkjes (Dutch for "through doorway views") to suggest other dimensions for his figures and Vermeer used his rectangular maps. Much of each artist's work deals with the relationship of the figure and this simple rectangle. Painting a painting or map in a picture is its own doorkijkje, and figures in painted doorways are also paintings within paintings. Maps were also (flat)metaphors for realms beyond the small corners of rooms where they hung. Mapmaking exploded in the 17th century Holland thanks to countless ship voyages exploring the old and New Worlds and were also symbolic of the Dutch command of world trade. ART "Placing maps within pictures reinforced the Dutch notion of painting as describing as opposed to the Italian narrative tradition in which pictures told stories. Mapping grew out the impulse to describe nature -an impulse that was shared at the time by surveyors, artists, printers and the general public in the Netherlands." The Art of Seeing by Laura Snyder *Amsterdam and Delft btw was only a few hour horseback ride away.

• Cover