Excerpt from Masters in Art<br><br>Another and exceptional merit of Pieter de Hooch is the excellent taste of his subjects. In a period when, under the name of polite subjects, it was the fashion to paint scenes which were little short of indecent, he confined himself almost exclusively to representing the life of honest, clean-living families; and even in the few cases when the intention of his scenes may seem equivocal to our more rigorous morality, there is nothing vile nor dis gusting in them. In the great majority of cases he shows us the sweet every day domestic cares and the humble labors of the household. In the Six Col lection, Amsterdam, there is a picture in which a mother is teaching her daughter to lay away the freshly laundered linen; in the Louvre there is an other in which a little child is playing in the kitchen. Such were the subjects which he loved best; and when in obedience to the desire of a fashionable pa tron he 'dealt with the life of the more aristocratic classes, he still preferred to employ his personages in such innocent diversions as in 'the Card-party' of the Louvre, or in the cheerful conversation piece of the National Gallery.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.