Teaching a Child to Walk

Pieter de Hooch's Teaching a Child to Walk from around 1670, in the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig, belongs to his Amsterdam period when his style evolved from the sunlit clarity of his Delft years toward darker, more ornate interiors. The tender subject of a mother guiding her child's first steps continues the domestic themes of his earlier work but in more elaborate bourgeois settings. De Hooch's Amsterdam paintings, while less luminous than his Delft masterpieces, document the increasingly prosperous interiors of the Dutch merchant class.

The composition creates spatial depth through the characteristic de Hooch device of an open doorway leading to an adjacent room. The Amsterdam-period palette is warmer and richer than his Delft works, with more attention to elaborate architectural detail and furnishings.