Well, here we are my friends, the 100th and final episode!
We go back to where it all started, the National Gallery of Art, for a look at one of Pieter de Hooch’s idealized depictions of what a Dutch household was supposed to be. This cozy home may have been more wishful thinking than reality, though!
We’ll find out how an embarrassing meeting helped create the Gallery! And I’ll share final thoughts and thank yous and a few podcast recommendations I think you’ll really like (listed below).
If you want to follow along, you can find it here on the Gallery’s site
SHOW NOTES (Transcript below)
“A Long Look” themes are “Easy” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and “At the Cafe with You” by Onion All Stars https://pixabay.com/users/onion_all_stars-33331904/
Episode Music
“The Well Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 846-869 – Prelude No. 19 in A major, BWV 864” composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Performed by Kimiko Ishizaka. Courtesy of musopen.org
https://musopen.org/music/43466-the-well-tempered-clavier-book-i-bwv-846-869
“Hand in Space” by Quantum Jazz
https://archive.org/details/jamendo-046377
Artwork information
https://www.nga.gov/artworks/1172-bedroom
Pieter de Hooch information
“Pieter de Hooch, 1629-1684” by Peter C. Sutton (Archive.org)
https://archive.org/details/pieterdehooch16200sutt
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/de-hooch-pieter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_de_Hooch
“Public and Private Life in the Art of Pieter de Hooch” by Martha Hollander (JSTOR)
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 51 (2000): 272–93. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24706499
Women in Dutch life
“The Embarrassment of Riches” by Simon Schama (Bookshop.org)
Gallery history
https://www.nga.gov/about-us/our-history
https://www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-gallery-of-art
“America’s National Gallery of Art” by Philip Kopper (Internet Archive)
https://archive.org/details/americasnational0000kopp/americasnational0000kopp
Jazz in the Garden
https://www.nga.gov/calendar/jazz-garden
“The Mill” by Rembrandt
https://www.nga.gov/artworks/1201-mill
The Object Podcast–Minneapolis Institute of Art
https://new.artsmia.org/the-object-podcast
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
https://manpodcast.com
Tyler Greene presents in-depth discussions with artists about their practice and curators about current shows for a fascinating look at today’s art world.
Immaterial
https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/series/immaterial-podcast
The Metropolitan of Art’s limited series podcast tells us surprising stories about the stuff art is made from.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson
Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you thru the experience of what I see and discover while looking at art for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the history, mystery, or controversy behind it!
Welcome to Episode 100! It’s also the final episode of A Long Look but I’ll explain more about that at the end. In the meantime, let’s go back to where it all began, The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
MUSIC
Today I’m looking at “The “Bedroom” by Pieter de Hooch [deh hoek]
If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/bedroom. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around!
So what do you first notice?
The little girl standing in the doorway of a sunlit room, looking over with a smile at her mom. She stands to our left, facing us, holding the latch of the open door in one hand and a ball in the other. The door’s about twice her height, so I’d guess she’s about 6 or 7 yrs old?
Her dark blonde hair sticks out from her head like a fuzzy halo and she wears a light grey shirt with brown sleeves and a mustard-yellow skirt. An olive-green apron is tucked at her waist.
Two sturdy wooden chairs stand on either side of her and the door. Their dark brown backrests are covered in a pattern of gold diamonds. A moss-green curtain over the right-hand hand chair is pushed to one side, revealing a window into a small entry hall beyond the girl. The lower half of the wall is covered with white and blue tiles.
She’s backlit by sunlight coming through another door in that back room, that’s where her fuzzy halo comes from! It opens onto an enclosed garden with green leafy plants climbing trellises and a red roof just visible over the far wall. A long window over the door allows in even more soft light.
Mom’s over in the right half of the room. She stands facing our left, smiling back at her daughter while holding a camel-brown blanket in both hands. A checkered coffee-brown blanket drapes over a chair in front of her and a gleaming squat brown jug sits on the almost spotless floor nearby.
An ivory-white kerchief covers her hair and she wears a scarlet-red shirt with a wide white collar tucked into a marine-blue skirt. A floor-to-ceiling amber-brown wooden cabinet just beyond her takes up almost half the room. It has a wide, shadowy alcove that almost fills its height and it’s framed by a dark brown valance and curtains pulled back on either side. Some kind of light-colored object peeks out from one corner.
The room has white walls, a paneled ceiling, and a terracotta-red tiled floor extending towards us. Soft light from tall windows on the left wall illuminates the room, highlighting a painting over the door. Closest to us on the left is a table with a jug sitting on a scarlet-red cloth with another framed object hanging above it.
This is a wonderfully calm painting–it’s only about 2 ft square–but what I love is de Hooch still gives it a little pizzazz. The curtain over the back window and the blanket over the chair have this subtle gold iridescence, almost like they were woven with metallic thread or made from some kind of shimmering fabric. Even the nailheads on those chairs gleam!
It’s morning and Mom’s straightening up for the day, folding away the bed linens and about to empty that chamber pot. The room is neat and clean with everything in its place. Mom and daughter look happy and healthy. Everything is bathed in that warm light from the windows and cooler light from the back door.
So where is this lovely, peaceful home?
MUSIC
Pieter de Hooch [hoek] painted this in Delft in 1658. And this might have been his own house and even his own wife and daughter Anna. They and the room show up in other paintings he did. It’s tough to identify the child because he had a son and daughter around the same age and boys and girls wore skirts when they were little. However, the Gallery’s site explains it’s probably Anna.
Turns out the title is kind of misleading, this is not actually a bedroom. Bedrooms weren’t a thing at this point. Dutch houses would have a main, multipurpose room and this enclosed bed–it’s called a box-bed–would have been part of it.
De Hooch was famous for painting cozy domestic scenes like this that just radiate warmth and safety. He might have been influenced by a writer named Jacob Cats who had very definite ideas about the role of women. Basically they boil down to a woman’s place is in the home.
The idea was the home is a shelter from the chaos of the outside world and mothers were responsible for keeping it clean and orderly and lovingly raising good children. As a Protestant country, the home and family had basically replaced the church as the moral center of society.
As usual though, real life was much different. The de Hooch’s had 7 kids and as anyone from a large family will tell you, home is rarely peaceful! However, the Dutch did live up to the ideal of clean, neat homes. It was so remarkable visitors from England and France even wrote about it in their diaries!
But Dutch women weren’t stuck at home, they were allowed a surprising amount of freedom for the time. They could own property, go out to shop and socialize by themselves, and even run a business.
Still, De Hooch’s interiors with their peeks of the outside world were highly popular for celebrating this idea of home as a sanctuary and that there was pleasure to be had in what one writer called, “ordinary things.”
Although I don’t know if ordinary things is accurate… Another visitor at the time said the Dutch basically spent every spare penny on “fabric and adornment or furniture for their houses.” I bet they would have loved Pinterest!
GALLERY HISTORY
Do you know how the National Gallery came about? Well, like most museums, the story starts with a very powerful and wealthy man. Andrew W. Mellon had made an enormous fortune and eventually became Secretary of the Treasury.
In 1928, while he was Secretary, he got the idea that Washington DC and America needed a prestigious National Gallery, just like European capitals like London, Paris and Berlin. He wanted DC to be on par with these sophisticated cities. One story says he’d get embarrassed when visiting dignitaries would come to meet with him and then ask to see America’s art collection and all he could offer was to view his own collection at his apartment.
So he began buying top-notch Old Master paintings and sculpture specifically for his dream museum and in 1936 wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt offering this collection to the nation along with the money to build the Gallery. Of course, FDR and Congress said yes! But one of the conditions Mellon required was that the museum NOT be named for him. He wanted to call it the National Gallery of Art because he realized other collectors would be a lot more willing to donate works if it was for the public and not a monument to just one guy.
Mellon donated only 126 paintings and 26 sculptures to serve as kind of a seed, another hint to his fellow collectors that they should donate too. His tactics worked. Eight other major collectors stepped up to donate works over the next several years.
The neoclassical style West Building was the original and was designed by John Russell Pope, who designed the National Archives and Jefferson Memorial. The Gallery opened in 1941 and during WWII, it stayed open on Sundays so members of the military and defense workers could come and enjoy it. The Gallery was also the HQ to the Monuments Men, the group of art experts who discovered and rescued art stolen by the Nazis!
In the 1970s, the very angular, light-filled East Building was added. It was designed by architect I.M. Pei and it’s where modern and contemporary art are shown, along with the library, research center, and offices.
And then there’s everybody’s favorite, the Sculpture Garden which opened in 1999. It’s across the street from the West Building and hosts one of DC’s favorite events–Jazz in the Garden. Every summer, there’s a free concert on Friday nights and you can come and have a picnic among the sculptures. Somebody sitting near us once called it “America’s backyard!”
Best of all, this art goodness is free for everybody!
FAREWELL
And that brings us to the end my friends! It’s been a difficult decision to end the show. I’d hope to continue, but after 8 years, I realized it was time to wrap it up.
Thanks to all of you who joined me on these long looks. When the show launched in 2017, I was brand-new to podcasting and saw it as a fantastic way to share something I was passionate about. I came up with this crazy idea of describing the experience of looking at art for minutes instead of just glancing and moving on.
This came out of my first visit to the National Gallery looking at a Rembrandt painting called “The Mill.” There is a big comfy couch in front of it and I ended up sitting there for 45 minutes letting my eyes roam all over the scene.
As I sat there, I experienced a sense of slowing down and noticing details, like how the beautiful evening light plays over the water and how the mill stands right where storm clouds and blue sky meet. It was that slow revelation and connection I wanted to share. And the back stories were meant to remind us of the flesh-and-blood, flawed, and inspired people behind these incredible works.
But would anyone listen to this?? Thankfully, all of you did!
The great thing about podcasting is it can lead in unexpected directions. Blind and visually impaired listeners discovered the show and told me how the descriptions helped them stay connected to art.
When I started, I had no idea what I was doing was called verbal description, I’d never even heard of it! But the podcast led to me writing descriptions like this for the Gallery and working with them was a lifelong dream. I learned that just because people lose their vision doesn’t mean they lose their love of art.
I also got to meet so many of the terrific museum professionals who really work hard behind the scenes to bring us the exhibitions and experiences we all love. So I’d like to thank the curators, educators, and especially the library staff at the Gallery, the Phillips Collection, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art for all their help.
The best part of the show was hearing from so many of you about much you enjoyed it, who said it was part of your routine and was a break from the outside world. Just like Pieter de Hooch, I’m glad the show provided a little shelter from the chaos!
The show and website will remain live so you can revisit favorite episodes and all the resources and music I’ve used are in the show notes on the site. So check out those links for your own art explorations!
Finally, I’ll leave some podcast recommendations in the show notes but there’s one podcast I highly recommend. It’s one of my favorites called The Object Podcast by the Minneapolis institute of Art. It’s similar to “A Long Look” in that it also tells stories about works in their collection and the host, Tim Gihring, is an absolutely terrific storyteller, sometimes really funny. I won’t lie, there’ve been some coffee spit takes listening to him!
OUTRO:
I hope you’ll continue doing long looks on your museum visits! Maybe invite a friend and show them what happens when you just slow down and let the art reveal itself.
As always, thanks for joining me!
Discover more from A Long Look Podcast
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.