exchanged the style of the Franckens for that of the pseudo-Italians at the beginning of the 16th century. Infected thus early with a mania which came to be very general in Holland, Honthorst went to Italy, where he copied the naturalism and eccentricities of Michelangelo da Caravaggio. Home again about 1614, after acquiring a considerable practice in Rome, he set up a school at Utrecht which flourished exceedingly; and he soon became so fashionable that Sir Dudley Carleton, then English envoy at the Hague, recommended his works to the earl of Arundel and Lord Dorchester. At the same time the queen of Bohemia, sister of Charles I. and electress palatine, being an exile in Holland, gave him her countenance and asked him to teach her children drawing; and Honthorst, thus approved and courted, became known to Charles I., who invited him to England. There he painted several portraits, and a vast allegory, now at Hampton Court, of Charles and his queen as Diana and Apollo in the clouds receiving the duke of Buckingham as Mercury and guardian of the king of Bohemia’s children. Charles I., whose taste was flattered alike by the energy of Rubens and the elegance of Van Dyck, was thus first captivated by the fanciful mediocrity of Honthorst, who though a poor executant had luckily for himself caught, as Lord Arundel said, “much of the manner of Caravaggio’s colouring, then so much esteemed at Rome.” It was his habit to transmute every subject into a night scene, from the Nativity, for which there was warrant in the example of Correggio, to the penitence of the Magdalen, for which there was no warrant at all. But unhappily this caprice, though “sublime in Allegri and Rembrandt,” was but a phantasm in the hands of Honthorst, whose prosaic pencil was not capable of more than vulgar utterances, and art gained little from the repetition of these quaint vagaries. Sandrart gave the measure of Honthorst’s popularity at this period when he says that he had as many as twenty apprentices at one time, each of whom paid him a fee of 100 florins a year. In 1623 he was president of his gild at Utrecht. After that he went to England, returning to settle anew at Utrecht, where he married. His position amongst artists was acknowledged to be important, and in 1626 he received a visit from Rubens, whom he painted as the honest man sought for and found by Diogenes Honthorst. In his home at Utrecht Honthorst succeeded in preserving the support of the English monarch, for whom he finished in 1631 a large picture of the king and queen of Bohemia “and all their children.” For Lord Dorchester about the same period he completed some illustrations of the Odyssey; for the king of Denmark he composed incidents of Danish history, of which one example remains in the gallery of Copenhagen. In the course of a large practice he had painted many likenesses—Charles I. and his queen, the duke of Buckingham, and the king and queen of Bohemia. He now became court painter to the princess of Orange, settled (1637) at the Hague, and painted in succession at the Castle of Ryswick and the House in the Wood. The time not consumed in producing pictures was devoted to portraits. Even now his works are very numerous, and amply represented in English and Continental galleries. His most attractive pieces are those in which he cultivates the style of Caravaggio, those, namely, which represent taverns, with players, singers and eaters. He shows great skill in reproducing scenes illuminated by a single candle. But he seems to have studied too much in dark rooms, where the subtleties of flesh colour are lost in the dusky smoothness and uniform redness of tints procurable from farthing dips. Of great interest still, though rather sharp in outline and hard in modelling, are his portraits of the Duke of Buckingham and Family (Hampton Court), the King and Queen of Bohemia (Hanover and Combe Abbey), Mary de Medici (Amsterdam town-hall), 1628, the Stadtholders and their Wives (Amsterdam and Hague), Charles Louis and Rupert, Charles I.’s nephews (Louvre, St Petersburg, Combe Abbey and Willin), and Lord Craven (National Portrait Gallery). His early form may be judged by a Lute-player (1614) at the Louvre, the Martyrdom of St John in S. M. della Scala at Rome, or the Liberation of Peter in the Berlin Museum; his latest style is that of the House in the Wood (1648), where he appears to disadvantage by the side of Jordaens and others.
Honthorst was succeeded by his brother William, born at Utrecht in 1604, who died, it is said, in 1666. He lived chiefly in his native place, temporarily at Berlin. But he has left little behind except a portrait at Amsterdam, and likenesses in the Berlin Museum of William and Mary of England.
HOOCH, PIETER DE (1629–?1678), Dutch painter, was
born in 1629, and died in Amsterdam probably shortly after
1677. He was a native of Rotterdam, and wandered early to
Haarlem and the Hague. In 1654 we find him again at Rotterdam,
where in that year he married a girl of Delft, Jannetje
van der Burch. From 1655 to 1657 he was a member of the
painter’s gild of Delft, but after that date we have no traces
of his doings until about 1668, when his presence is recorded
in Amsterdam. His dated pictures prove that he was still
alive in 1677, but his death followed probably soon after this
year. De Hooch is one of the kindliest and most charming
painters of homely subjects that Holland has produced. He
seems to have been born at the same time and taught in the
same school as van der Meer and Maes. All three are disciples
of the school of Rembrandt. Houbraken mentions Nicolas
Berchem as De Hooch’s teacher. De Hooch only once painted
a canvas of large size, and that unfortunately perished in a fire
at Rotterdam in 1864. But his small pieces display perfect
finish and dexterity of hand, combined with great power of
discrimination. Though he sometimes paints open-air scenes,
these are not his favourite subjects. He is most at home in
interiors illuminated by different lights, with the radiance of the
day, in different intensities, seen through doors and windows.
He thus brings together the most delicate varieties of tone,
and produces chords that vibrate with harmony. The themes
which he illustrates are thoroughly suited to his purpose. Sometimes
he chooses the drawing-room where dames and cavaliers
dance, or dine, or sing; sometimes—mostly indeed—he prefers
cottages or courtyards, where the housewives tend their children
or superintend the labours of the cook. Satin and gold are as
familiar to him as camlet and fur; and there is no article of
furniture in a Dutch house of the middle class that he does
not paint with pleasure. What distinguishes him most besides
subtle suggestiveness is the serenity of his pictures. One of his
most charming was the canvas formerly in the Ashburton
collection, now burnt, where an old lady with a dish of apples
walks with a child along a street bounded by a high wall,
above which gables and a church steeple are seen, while the
sun radiates joyfully over the whole. Fine in another way is
the “Mug of Beer” in the Amsterdam Museum, an interior
with a woman coming out of a pantry and giving a measure
of beer to a little girl. The light flows in here from a small
closed window; but through the door to the right we look into
a drawing-room, and through the open sash of that room we
see the open air. The three lights are managed with supreme
cunning. Beautiful for its illumination again is the “Music
Party,” with its contending indoor and outdoor lights, a gem in
the late A. Thieme collection at Leipzig. More subtly suggestive,
in the museum of Berlin, is the “Mother seated near a Cradle.”
“A Card Party,” dated 1658, at Buckingham Palace, is a good
example of De Hooch’s drawing-room scenes, counterpart as
to date and value of a “Woman and Child” in the National
Gallery, and the “Smoking Party,” formerly in Lord Enfield’s
collection. Another very fine example is the “Interior” with
two women, bought by Sir Julius Wernher. Other pictures
later in the master’s career are—the “Lady and Child in a
Courtyard,” of 1665, in the National Gallery, and the “Lady
receiving a Letter,” of 1670, in the Amsterdam Museum (Van
der Hoop collection).
It is possible to bring together over 250 examples of De Hooch. There are three at St Petersburg, three in Buckingham Palace, three in the National Gallery, two in the Wallace Collection, six in the Amsterdam Museum, some in the Louvre and at Munich and Darmstadt; many others are in private galleries in England. For England was the first country to recognize the merit of De Hooch who only
