Hendrick van der Burch was a seventeenth-century Dutch genre painter regarded as a member of the Delft School.¹ This group of artists specialised in scenes of domestic life, characterised by a refined use of perspective and subtle effects of light and atmosphere; its most celebrated proponents include Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684) and Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675). Much of Van der Burch’s early biography remains obscure, due in part to the commonality of his name (he had no less than six namesakes living in Delft around 1650).² He was probably born in Honselersdijk in 1627 to the candlemaker Rochus Hendricksz. van der Burch and was baptised in June of that year in nearby Naaldwijk, two small villages west of Delft. He was first recorded in the city in 1642 and must have received his training there, although his teacher remains unknown. Only one Hendrick van der Burch appears in the records of the Delft Guild of Saint Luke, where he is first documented in 1649 at the age of 21. Van der Burch did not remain in Delft for long—he is recorded in Leiden in 1655, in Amsterdam in 1659, and again in Leiden between 1661 and 1663, before his return to Delft in 1664. In Leiden in 1655, he married Cornelia Cornelisdr. van Rossum, with whom he had five children. His son Rochus would also become a painter and was taught by him.³

A reconstruction of the evolution of Van der Burch’s work is rendered difficult by the near-absence of signed and dated works. It is likely, however, that he initially worked in the manner of guardroom painters such as Pieter Codde (1599–1678) and Willem Duyster (1599–1635), and was influenced by the Delft master Anthonie Palamedesz. (1601–1673). From the late 1650s onwards, he became more interested in depicting the connections between indoor and outdoor spaces.⁴ In the 1660s, he turned increasingly to refined genre interiors, in which Pieter de Hooch’s influence is unmistakable. The affinity between these two artists is hardly coincidental. Despite Van der Burch’s short-lived residence in Delft, several notarial documents from the 1650s and 1660s attest to the ongoing contact between the two artists.⁵ Van der Burch’s (step?)sister, Jannetje, married Pieter de Hooch in 1654, so, as well as being professional colleagues, the two painters were also brothers-in-law.⁶ It has been proposed by Piet Bakker and Jaap van der Veen that this close relationship extended to workshop practice, with De Hooch working in Van der Burch’s studio in the early 1650s.⁷ The likeness of their art demonstrates that they continued to share ideas and created works of a ‘Delft type’ of genre interior developed by De Hooch.⁸

Given the two artists’ close personal and artistic ties, it is unsurprising that their œuvres have at times been confused, with several of Van der Burch’s paintings misattributed to De Hooch. A Family Group with a Maidservant in The Klesch Collection once bore Pieter de Hooch’s initials and was believed to be by his hand until it was reattributed to Van der Burch by Peter Sutton in 1980.⁹ Both artists frequently depicted interiors and courtyard settings, often incorporating doorkijkjes—views into adjacent spaces.¹⁰ The costume worn by the seated woman indicates that the present painting can likely be dated to the 1660s. In this period, Van der Burch favoured steeply inclined floors and compositions that include both sides of a room, as can be seen here.¹¹ Van der Burch left Delft in 1664. Although his date of death remains unknown, he is last documented at the baptism of one of his daughters in Leiden in 1666.¹²

¹ This text is based on the 1980 article by Peter C. Sutton in The Burlington Magazine, in which most of the biographical data known about Hendrick van der Burch today was published; P.C. Sutton, ‘Hendrick van der Burch’, The Burlington Magazine, 122, no. 926, May 1980, pp. 315–26. For an in-depth analysis and comparison of paintings by De Hooch and Van der Burch, see M. Kersten, D. Lokin and M. Plomp, Delft Masters, Vermeer’s Contemporaries: Illusionism through the Conquest of Light and Space, exh. cat., Museum Prinsenhof Delft, Delft 1996.
² Sutton 1980, pp. 315–16.
³ A. Rüger in W. Liedtke et al., Vermeer and the Delft School, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2001, p. 235.
⁴ Sutton 1980, p. 320.
⁵ Kersten, Lokin and Plomp 1996, p. 132. For a summary of these documents, see Sutton 1980, pp. 325–26.
⁶ Sutton 1980, pp. 315–16.
⁷ The arguments for this theory are their joint appearances in legal documents, their familial connection, as well as the thematic and stylistic affinities in their work, alongside the fact that De Hooch only registered as a master in Delft on 20 September 1655, while Van der Burch left the city for Leiden later that same year. See: P. Bakker, ‘Pieter de Hooch’, in The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 2nd ed., A.K. Wheelock Jr. (ed.), New York 2017–20, https://theleidencollection.com/artists/pieter-de-hooch/ (archived June 2020), pp. 2, 4–5 n. 5; J. Van der Veen, ‘Pieter de Hooch: Profile of a Painter in Rotterdam, Delft, and Amsterdam’, in Pieter de Hooch in Delft. From the Shadow of Vermeer, A. Jansen (ed.), exh. cat., Museum Prinsenhof Delft, Delft 2019, p. 23.
⁸ W. Liedtke, ‘Genre Painting in Delft after 1650: De Hooch and Vermeer’, in New York 2001, p. 131.
⁹ Sutton 1980, p. 324.
¹⁰ Sutton in private correspondence, 2017.
¹¹ Sutton 1980, p. 319; Sutton 2017.
¹² Sutton 1980, p. 319.