About Pieter de Hooch: The Dutch Artist, Pieter De Hooch was born in Rotterdam to Hendrick Hendricksz de Hooch, a bricklayer, and Annetge Pieters, a midwife.He was the eldest of five children and outlived all of his siblings. He studied art in Haarlem under the landscape painter, Nicolaes Berchem. Beginning in 1650, he worked as a painter and servant for a linen-merchant and art collector named Justus de la Grange. Most scholars believe that Pieter de Hooch Paintings after around 1670 became more stylized and deteriorated in quality. It has been surmised that this was in part due to deteriorating health de Hooch died in 1684 in an Amsterdam insane asylum, though how he came to be there is unrecorded.