Dutch Interior paintings can feel strangely fulfilling. They present the security of small, special worlds while remaining incomplete and unresolved. Rooms in which intimate scenes play out open onto the uncertainty of whatever lies outside. Doors and windows give onto scenes we can only partly see, the rest of which we have to imagine. In these paintings we find a sense of the future we might recognise to be true: a future that is uncertain. We move from something we almost feel we should not know, a glimpse of a private moment, towards a place we can only ever begin to know. These are paintings that fulfil both our need to know and our desire to be teased, which offer up the consequences of knowing too much and not enough.

De Hooch gives us domestic scenes like the one above: ‘Woman Reading and a Child with a Hoop’. In a darkened room a little girl in a golden yellow dress looks through a doorway at a man standing looking at somebody or something else. A woman sits next to the little girl, in the corner of the room, holding a book. She seems to be caught between reading and realising something has affected the little girl. It is as if she is about to look up from the book. There are windows to the room through which I can see other windows and, in the distance, trees. However, the room’s windows seem to disconnect these things. They and the doorway have something of a dream about them. Every opening in the room should, according to what we know about rooms and what is outside of them, lead onto a space that is connected, inter-related, part of the same thing. It’s uncertain whether the world we see through each opening has everything in common with the world we see through the others. 

In the foreground there is a little dog and a monkey. Both are agitated, maybe helping us realise something about the little girl’s state of mind. The little girl holds a hoop in her left hand and perhaps a stick in her right hand. Her right hand is raised but is it to roll the hoop or catch the attention of the man outside? She wants the man’s to turn back to her. He’s gone. Perhaps she feels on her own, not even in the same place as the woman beside her. The woman has been somewhere else, lost in her book. What does the woman feel when she realises how the little girl feels? 

There is a painting on the wall in the room and unfortunately the reproduction here is too poor for us to see it properly, but a woman in the painting sits in a way that begins to mirror the woman sitting reading in the room. Some of us may want to know more about that painting or about the painting hanging above the woman reading the book. Some may be happiest with its obscurity. This painting offers us so many different ways to think about what is seen all too clearly and what is not really seen at all. One reality sits next to another without ever properly announcing itself: the little girl and the woman; the windows and the view outside. De Hooch takes us into our imaginations and a feeling of the future.