Pieter de Hooch

Merry Company with Two Men and Two Women, also known as The Visit, is an oil-on-panel painting by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch, created c. 1657. It is an example of a Merry Company, a popular form of genre painting in Dutch Golden Age painting showing a group of figures, who are not meant to be identified as portraits, enjoying each other's company. It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. The painting was documented by Hofstede de Groot in 1910, who wrote:192. TWO LADIES AND TWO GENTLEMEN IN AN INTERIOR. Sm. 34. The party are assembled in the left-hand corner of a room, beside a large window, the upper part of which is fastened back. At the left corner of the table stands a girl, pouring out wine; she wears a red jacket trimmed with white fur, a blue skirt, and a large white apron. A young gentleman, wearing a white costume, with a broad collar and a slouch hat, stands behind the table looking at the girl; he leans with his right hand on a chair-back, and holds a pipe in his left. To the right of the table sits a gentleman in a black cape with long curls which conceal his profile; he takes the arm of a girl, who sits beside him and regards him with a watchful...