Room 25

Doorways and tiled floors can draw your eye deep into a painted building. In The Courtyard of a House in Delft, Pieter de Hooch makes that movement part of an ordinary domestic scene. The room also contains Vermeer’s young women at virginals, keyboard instruments whose music adds another implied presence. Other artists tested the limits of perspective more directly. Carel Fabritius’s A View of Delft was designed for a curved surface. Samuel van Hoogstraten made a peepshow whose space depends on a particular viewpoint. Compare these experiments with the apparent ease of a painted interior. A quiet-looking room can take considerable calculation to make convincing.