Pieter de Hooch, A Woman with a Baby in Her Lap, and a Small Child, 1658 (private collection).
Jay Bernstein writes:
In A Woman with a Baby in Her Lap, and a Small Child we are offered an image of great naturalness and intimacy: the mother quietly telling the sleeping infant on her lap about his(?) sister who, mimetically repeating the mother’s embrace, is holding the family dog, which she is intending to show to her sibling. The “action” of the painting is meant to create a small, closed, feminine universe: the white-washed walls of the room with a small room behind it whose windows let in a light that, although bright, is indefinitely softened as it slips through curtains and along walls, becoming finally diffused as it descends into the embrace of the room below; the light too embraces. I am almost tempted to say that de Hooch makes the falling light and surrounding room objective correlatives of the holding and embrace enacted by mother and daughter: protecting their vulnerable, animal (which is to say finite and natural) others — baby and dog. Still, we know from the glare on the door (again nearly whitened) that the sun outside is bright, so bright that it bleaches to the point of near unrecognizability a portrait hanging on the wall of the small room; the portrait must be of the father of the house. The enclosing space is generated by the exclusion of the male gaze; blinded by sunlight, he knows nothing of the world he naively believes he oversees.
