Pieter de Hooch's window shutter with the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (1661)

Abstract

The article deals with Pieter de Hooch’s painting ‘Woman with a Basket full of Beans in a Garden’ of 1661 (Kunstmuseum, Basel), and more specifically with the identity of the man on the window shutter of the building in the foreground (uncovered between 1913-1927), who, I argue, represents the Emperor Charles V, whose portrait still graces many buildings in the northern Netherlands. I also argue that the building on the painting represents a ‘hofje’ or almshouse, and that its architecture resembles that of the Leiden Eva van Hoogeveenshofje, built by Arent van ‘s-Gravesande in the 1650s. This suggests that De Hooch did not only paint in Delft and Amsterdam, but also in Leiden. In the garden of the almshouse a servant girl is shown picking beans. One may wonder what a servant girl might be doing in an institution intended for providing poor relief. As I will show, the inhabitants of the almshouses in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic were not the poorest of the poor, and some were even quite well-off and did indeed keep servants. Contemporaries sometimes likened the Dutch almshouses to palaces; their superb architecture beautified the cities, was praised by foreign visitors and reflected well on the Calvinist city councils. The portrait of the emperor, I argue, may have been meant as a humorous critique of this type of poor relief. As the addition is unusual for De Hooch’s work, it may have been the artist himself who blotted it out, thus changing the image into a straight-forward genre scene, of a type that was to be quite successful and that De Hooch continued to paint after his move to Amsterdam in 1660.