A Mother's Duty

In the pictureA mother in a red jacket sits on a chair, parting with both hands the hair of a child whose head is buried in her lap. Behind her, white pillows are piled inside a box bed hung with curtains, and a round brass implement hangs on the wall. On the left, through an open door, are a sunlit back room, a half-open window and a tree outside, and a dog sitting on the red tile floor looks that way. A large basket stands in the center, a wooden chair with a lid is at right front, and a framed landscape hangs above the door.

BackgroundThe title the museum gives is A Mother Delousing Her Child's Hair, a scene of a mother carefully checking her child's head for lice. Inside the modest Dutch house are blue Delft picture tiles and a box bed, and the museum explains that the chair at right front is a child's chair holding a chamber pot. Pieter de Hooch (1629–about 1683) painted many domestic interiors like this in Delft in the 1650s and moved to Amsterdam around 1660. Compositions that let the viewer look through a door into another room or a courtyard were his specialty. The signature is written on the child's chair.

Puzzle tipThe red tile floor covers the bottom third of the picture, which makes it easy to match by following the direction of the grout lines. First fit the mother's red jacket, the white pillows of the bed and the bright patch of sunlight beyond the door on the left, then expand the floor using the black silhouette of the seated dog as a guide. The walls and ceiling are a similar yellowish brown, so separate them by the vertical lines of the door frame, the two picture frames and the straight lines of the window frame on the right. The blue tiled wall and the basket also help fix positions. The recommended size is the Normal level, about 48 pieces.