THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 796
Still life composed of human beings
It may be a feature of nearness in general that it is narrow and gives that impression. A small surface contracts, makes a pleasantly comprehensible circle. It paints an
existence which can easily become musty in real life, but is strangely warm when presented as a painting. Tame comfort plays a part here, which is usefully content, but
also pleasure in the secure circle and within it. This is above all the case where the circle is gained by our own efforts and life within it is not cramped but secured and
enclosed, and thus exhibits peaceful warmth. As in the Dutch interior picture, everything becomes a parlour here, even the street, a stove is always burning, even
outside in the spring. Vermeer, Metsu, Pieter de Hooch portrayed such cosy living, a home sweet home still without any mustiness. The wife reads a letter or confers
with the cook, the mother peels apples or watches over her child in a courtyard. The old lady walks down the street along a high wall, overlooked by gabled roofs on
the other side, nothing else happens, sunbeams pour through the small silent scene. And in the actual interior the silence becomes entirely that expressed by cooing
doves in an old enclosed courtyard; it is structured by light falling in at various angles. ‘A mug of beer’ (Amsterdam) shows the obliquely lit chamber in which a woman,
with infinite calm, is pouring out her beer; to the right the view leads through the open door into the living room flooded with light and through its window­frame out into
the open air. The light falling in at three different angles opens the narrowness and homeliness without enlarging it; the room is primary in all pictures compared with the
figures, but it encloses them, is only there for its nearness. The objects of bourgeois comfort calmly reveal themselves, the brass lamp shade on the wall, the red tiles,
the brown armchair. Everywhere there is an orderly way of life per se, a tidiness of the house and a cheerfulness of mind. Even the vanishing lines are delimiting, even
the view through the windows does not extend beyond a hundred or two hundred metres in Hooch. A junk shop of happiness appears, and it has the effect here of a
treasure chamber. Nothing but domestic everyday life is painted in the Dutch genre picture, but for all its nearness it is also presented in just the same way as a sailor
may see it from a distance when he thinks of home: as the small, sharp painting which bears homesickness within it. Corresponding to this on the other hand is the fact
that there are very often maps of the world hanging on the wall in these pictures, with the ocean looking in, which