Pieter de Hooch

Jacob Crammer  Symonsz.., Amsterdam, 1778; 
His sale, Amsterdam, November 25, 1778, lot 12 (as oil on panel), for 520 guilders, to J. Danser Nijman;¹
J. Danser Nijman, Amsterdam, 1778-1797;
His sale, Amsterdam, August 16, 1797, lot 114, for 400 guilders, to Roos;
B. Ocke, Leyden, 1817;
His sale, Leyden, April 21-22, 1817, lot 54, for 370 guilders, to Van den Berg;
A.B. Roothaan, Amsterdam, 1826;
His sale, Amsterdam, March 29, 1826, lot 39, for 1185 guilders, to Brondgeest;
Sir Charles Bagot, by 1833;
His sale, London, Christie's, June 18, 1836, lot 37, for £68, to Nieuwenhuys;
Desire van der Schrieck, Louvain;
His sale Brussels, Paril 8-10, 1861, lot 34, for 6000 francs to Schollaert;
Schollaert (son-in-law of Van der Schriek), Louvain;
From whom acquired by G. Helleputte-Schollaert in 1899;
Art market, New York, by 1923;
With Kleykamp, The Hague, 1927;
With Knoedler, New York, 1927;
Allan C. Balch, Los Angeles, by 1927;
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Allan C. Balch to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1944, (Acc. No. M.44.2.8).

London, British Institution, 1834, no.. 107;
The Hague (Kleykamp) 1927, no. 19;
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Balch Collection and Old Masters from the Los Angeles Collection, March 26-April 30, 1944, no. 49;
La Jolla, La Jolla Museum of Art, Dutch and Flemish Paintings of the Northern Renaissance, June 3-September 20, 1964, no. 14;
Delft, Stedelijk Museum het Prinsenhof, Delft Masters: Vermeer's contemporaries: illusionism through the conquest of light and space, March 1-June 2, 1996;
Denver, The Denver Art Museum; Newark, The Newark Museum, The Art of Home and Private Life: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, September 2001.

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, Vol. IV, London 1833, pp. 222-3, cat.no. 11;
H. Havard, "Pieter de Hooch", in Nederlandsch L'Art et les artistes hollandais, vol. III, chapter 1, Paris 1880, p.102;
C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné..., Vol. 1, London 1908, cat. nos. 30, 31 and 51, (English ed., trans. By E.G. Hawke, 1907);
A. de Rudder, Pieter de Hooch et son Oeuvre, Brussels 1913, pp. 32, 97;
C. Brière-Misme, "Tableaux inédits ou peu connus de Pieter de Hooch", in Gazette des beaux Arts, Parts I-III, 5e per, July-August, November 1927, p. 264, reproduced, p. 268;
W.R. Valentiner, "Pieter de Hooch. Part Two", in Art in America, vol. 15, 1927, p. 76, cat. no. 16;
W.R. Valentiner, Pieter de Hooch. Des Meisters Gemälde in 180 Abbildungen mit einem Anhang über die Genremaler um Pieter de Hooch und die Kunst Hendrick van der Burchs, Klassiker der Kunst, vol. 35, Berlin-Leipzig 1929, cat. no. 91 (English ed., trans. A.M. Sharkey and E. Schwandt, London 1930);
Los Angeles County Museum, Quarterly, vol. 4, Spring and Summer 1944, cat. no. 10, reproduced, fig. 7;
The Balch Collection and Old Masters from the Los Angeles Collection, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles 1944, cat. no. 49, reproduced;
R. Mckinney, "The Balch Art: Rich Gift for California", in Art News, December 1944, p.11, reproduced, fig. 12;
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A Catalogue of Flemish, German, Dutch and English Paintings, XV-XVIII Century, Los Angeles 1954, vol. II, p. 67, reproduced, plate 73;
Dutch and Flemish Paintings of the Northern Renaissance, exhibition catalogue, La Jolla  1964, cat. no. 14;
H.T. Hopkins, ed., Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Illustrated Handbook, West Germany 1965, p. 72, reproduced;
P. Sutton, Pieter de Hooch, Ithaca 1980, p.102, cat. no. 88, reproduced, plate 91;
K. Christiansen, Lorenzo Lotto and the Tradition of Epithalamic Paintings," in Apollo, September 1986, pp. 170-71, reproduced, fig. 6;
D.R. Smith, "Irony and Civility:  Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting," in The Art Bulletin, LXIX, no. 3, September 1987, p. 414, reproduced fig. 11;
Edwards, JoLynn, Alexandre-Joseph Paillet:  Expert et marcharnd de tableaux à la fin du XVIII^e siècle, Paris 1996, p. 130, reproduced p. 129;
M.Kersten, Delft Masters: Vermeer's contemporaries: illusionism through the conquest of light and space, exhibition catalogue, March Delft 1996;
B.Cooks, What are you Wearing? Looking at Children's Fashions in Paintings from the Permanent Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1999;
Dr. H. Chapman, The Art of Home and Private Life: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, exhibition catalogue, Denver and Newark 2001;
Bachtler, Sammlerlust, Europäishe Kunst aus fünf Jahrhunderten, Munich 2003;
T. Nakamura and T. Dibbits, Milkmaid by Vermeer and Dutch Genre Painting: Masterworks from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 2007.

The following condition report has been provided by Nancy Krieg, 52 East 82nd St. New York, NY 212-734-8330, nancykrieg@nyc.rr.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. CONDITION REPORT* The work is on a canvas support which has an old glue lining. This lining is quite brittle but is still providing adequate support. The original canvas is slightly pressed in appearance. A pattern of raised craquelure is found in the area of the mantle skirt. This craquelure is due to some shrinkage of the paint layer and is probably not reversible. Examination under UV suggests that the painting has been recently restored. There is very little in the way of retouching aside from a small area at the bottom of the red skirt of the seated woman. There is some blanching on the side chair against the back wall. Some mild abrasion is present in the framed painting above the mantle. There is a loss in the sense of translucency in the glass of the open window pane and the objects in the mirror do not read as reflections. The sense of light entering the room from the left is very strong and the overall atmospheric quality of the painting is well preserved. The modeling of the faces of the seated woman and child are in excellent condition and exhibit fresh and lively brushwork. The painting is in very good condition overall. *This painting was examined on site and not under studio conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

A Woman Handing a Coin to a Serving Woman is a relatively late work by Pieter de Hooch datable to circa 1668-72.  He painted it in Amsterdam, where he had moved from his native Delft in around 1660-61. While he continued to paint the domestic scenes for which he is famous, his interiors were increasingly more spacious and beautifully furnished, the fabrics more luxurious and the subjects more elegant.  This may be explained in part by the more cosmopolitan and wealthier clientele he found in Amsterdam, but it is also part of a more general trend in Dutch painting in the later decades of the seventeenth century. We see this same evolution in the modish, attenuated figures of Jacob Ochtervelt and Casper Netscher, among others.  The mistress of the house in A Woman Handing a Coin to a Serving Woman, with her elaborate coiffure, fur-trimmed jacket and silk skirt is more stylish and seems more delicate than the frankly bourgeois figures of De Hooch's Delft period.

In Amsterdam, De Hooch focused on a limited number of themes; one of them, as Sutton describes it, was that of women as "domestic administrators." ¹ He shows his subjects at home and engaged in the activities related to running an upper middle class house.  In A Woman Handing a Coin to a Serving Woman, the wife is sending her maid off to buy milk (or possibly beer) while the daughter of the house tugs at the maid's skirt, anxious to be off.  The action is set in a clear, elegant interior, which De Hooch also used in a number of other paintings of the same period.  The closest is Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk in the Musem der bildenden Künste in Leipzig (Sutton 87),² also of circa 1668-72.  The compositions are very similar from the large windows at the left, to the foreground table, to the positioning of the woman under the mirror, and even to the mantel with its arrangement of Chinese vases and bowls.  The relationship of the three figures is also comparable, although in the Leipzig picture it is the child who is in the middle.  The wife herself reappears only slightly changed in A Woman at Her Toilet with an Officer in Apsley House (Sutton 70), of circa1665, and a little older and heavier in A Woman Knitting with a Serving Woman and a Child in an English private collection (Sutton 103), of circa 1673.  Despite the greater emphasis on wealth and elegance, A Woman Handing a Coin to a Serving Woman has that timeless quality that characterizes De Hooch as a painter.  The movement flows from the exchange of the coin, down through the servant's arm to the large bucket and is then swept along the folds of her skirt to the arm of the child grasping her with one hand and pointing out their route with the other.  The delicately modulated light shining in from the windows at the left surrounds the figures and imbues them with a remarkable stillness, like figures frozen in a dance. 

1.  See literature, P. Sutton, Pieter de Hooch, pp. 46-7.
2.  Ibid, p. 102.