Term: Houding

A term using by the Dutch masters to describe an essential element of art. Unfortunately, modern scholars do not agree on the meaning of the word. Some have translated it as "conception" or "attitude, while others understand it as a "gradual softening of colors". More recently it has been used to describe the "tonal and spatial organization of a picture as a whole".

A contemporary definition by Goeree of houding is as follows "...that which binds everything together in a drawing or a painting, which makes things move to the front or the back, from the foreground to the middle ground and hence to the background to stand in its proper place without appearing farther away or closer, and without seeming lighter or darker than its distance warrants; so that everything stands out, without confusion, from things that adjoin and surround it, and has an unambiguous position through the proper use of size and color, and light and shadow, and so that the eye can naturally perceive the intervening space, that distance between bodies which is left open and empty, both near and far, as though one might go there on foot, and everything stands in its proper space therein."