oil on canvas
38 3/4 x 46 1/4 in. (98.5 x 117.5 cm.)
Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis Mauritshuis,
Vermeer included about 15 figures in his painting. The costumes of the six figures in the foreground designate their social standing, from the fashionable attire of the three burgers standing by the boat, to the simpler regional or peasant garment of black skirts and jackets with white collars and shoulder clothes of the other women. A figure of a broad-hatted man just to the right of the two women was painted out by Vermeer.
The delicate ripples on the waterway's surface indicates an almost windless morning. The slight movement of the water causes the reflections of the skyline to be partially obscured adding to the discreet mystery of the image. However, radiograph images demonstrate that this effect was not originally sought by Vermeer. Initially, the reflections were far more precise than they are in the final version (see image left). The radiograph also reveals that the Rotterdam Gate was not entirely cast in shadow as it appears today but received more light that produced an effect of greater contrast..
It was a common Dutch convention in cityscapes to place a large body of water in front of the subject.
A low, billowy cumulus cloud casts a shadow on the foreground harbor of the View of Delft while the rest of the city is inundated by early morning light. The fact that only a minute later the shapes and positions of the clouds as well as the patterns of light and dark of the cityscape would have dramatically changed subliminally engages the viewer's participation. However peacefully eternal this scene may appear, it is in reality a portrayal of one moment in time.
Vermeer hardly invented such a devise on his own. Imaginative Dutch landscape painters routinely exploited spectacular or peculiar lightings created by overhanging clouds in order to enliven their beloved but uneventful landscape and to create a heightened sense of nature.
The sky was executed with large flat brushes (a few hairs from the brush are embedded into the paint) over a white base which heightens the luminosity of the subtle, pastel grays and light blues. Approaching the horizon, the pale blue was lightened with lead white plus a small quantity of lead-tin yellow to intensify the pale tint.
Kees Kaldenbach, Dutch art historian and Vermeer expert, has extensively researched the artist's connections to his hometown Delft. Among other things, he identified the tow barges, freight ships and herring busses that populate the View of Delft and even the specific time of the year which Vermeer represented.
Dr Kaldenbach wrote: "Each year the active season of the herring busses was limited by law from June 1st to the end of December. Herring busses were costly investments. These ships were used optimally during that legal fishery season. These two ships are however far away from their regular harbor of Delfshaven and are clearly under repair, missing a few masts and being otherwise empty, floating extremely high on the water. This in turn indicates an early season for the total scene. Given the orientation of the scene, the full green foliage and the active maintenance works on these two ships which are moored at the Delft shipyard - getting ready before June 1st - it follows that the intended scene and/or the actual conception of this painting must be dated at an early morning in the first half of May."
This large construction, which dates from medieval times, was called the Rotterdam Gate. In a drawing by Jan van Kessel (see Related Images no. 5), the structure's purpose is evident from the crenellated top, arrow slits and apertures for aiming and discharging weapons. Between the defense work and the city gate, a long covered bridge spans most of the moat. The Rotterdam Gate was eventually pulled down in 1836. The only Delft gate which exists today is the lovely Oostpoort, whose twin-towers are frequently mistaken by tourists for the Rotterdam Gate.
If one compares the site with a section of the large Kaart Figuratief of Delft that was executed in the mid-1670s, we see that the building is a bit more irregular than Vermeer suggests (see left). The twin towers, for example, seem to project farther out into the water. Evidently Vermeer flattened the angle of the gate distorting the perspective in order to create a more compact composition.
In a drawing by the topographical artist Abraham Rademaker (see Related Images no. 7) where the vantage point is slightly closer and lower than Vermeer's, the general aspect of the place is comparable even though it portrays only the portion of the Rotterdam Gate. Rademaker, like many other artists who depicted the area, emphasized the horizontal bands on the side of the Rotterdam Gate that were made by alternating levels of brick and light-colored natural stone which Vermeer played down in order to give the construction a more solid appearance.
The Schiedam Gate is on the left of the stone bridge and the Rotterdam Gate. Maria Thins's house in Oude Langendijk where Vermeer and his family lived, would be just to the right of the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk, although it is not visible in this picture. A tiny clock indicates that it is about seven o'clock. At one time, a projecting structure identical to the one of the right-hand Rotterdam Gate introduced the Schiedam Gate as well. In 1614, everything in front of the Schiedam Gate proper was torn down to make way for the Kolk, the triangular harbor where Vermeer's boats and barges are moored.
Delft's city gates were built to watch over water and land traffic and defend the city where enemy was likely to attack. A portcullis could be lowered to seal the town's entrance. Up to the middle of the 18th century the gates served to collect a city excise tax which was levied on all goods passing on road and water ways. Not a single stone remains of either of the two ancient gates after the demolition of the Schiedam gate in 1834 and the Rotterdam Gate in 1836.
Although there exists a plethora of Dutch 17th-century cityscapes, none are able to transport the viewer back in time and convey the material sense of water, air, brick and mortar as much as Vermeer's View of Delft. When we stand in front of the picture it is almost as if we had been projected in a time capsule to the southern ramparts of Delft's city gates in the early 1660s.
Even if the architectonic rendering is fundamentally accurate, Vermeer did not follow the topographical convention of emphasizing the major landmarks. He also took artistic license altering dimensions and contours of some of the main buildings. In this detail (see left), one of the largest and most venerable monuments in Delft, the Oude Kerk, is almost concealed. We can barely catch a glimpse of the grayish top of the complicated Gothic spire which timidly peers out just above the skyline. Curiously, even though the area portrayed in the View of Delft has been heavily reconstructed over the centuries, the same slice of the Oude Kerk's tower is still visible over modern skyline.
The leaning tower of the Oude Kerk, probably built on an early filled-up canal, has been the cause of considerable alarm to local inhabitants. In 1843, the City Council of Delft, fearing the collapse of the tower, decided that it had to be pulled down to the level of the church roof. Local contractors were able to prevent this decision from actually being carried out. Nowadays, the leaning tower of Oude Kerk is a prominent emblem of Delft, fondly called by the citizens the "Scheve Jan" ("Leaning Jan").
On 15th December, 1675, Johannes Vermeer was buried in Oude Kerk, in a family crypt in the northern transept, bought by his mother-in-law Maria Thins in 1661. But when he died there was no money for a tombstone. Today his burial place has two grave markers: a rather austere one from 1975 made to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the artist's death, located at about the same place as the former family grave, and a new larger, discreetly-decorated one near the western side entrance placed 26th January 2007. However, even though we can no longer identify the exact location of Vermeer's tomb, the great Delft artist is in the company of some of the city's most excellent citizens.
While the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk is so strikingly illuminated as to seem real, it does not appear totally accurate in its dimensions. In a rather picturesque view by Jan de Beyer from 1750, the tower is much higher. Vermeer's tower generally differs from those of other topographical renderings of the same spot. The proportions of the existing building suggest that his tower is somewhat wider and somewhat lower. He may have minimized its scale to emphasize its distance from the foreground plane. It also blends more successfully with the horizontality of the composition than it would were it larger. To augment the tower's luminosity and make is stand out amongst the surrounding buildings, Vermeer has almost sculpted the sunlit portions with the lumpy lead-tin yellow, the brightest yellow pigment available to artists of the time.
Much has been made about the historical importance of this monumental structure in relation to Vermeer's intentions. The Nieuwe Kerk had a profound meaning not only for the citizens of Delft, but for all Dutchmen. The Nieuwe Kerk quickly gained fame in the 17th-century as the location of the tomb of William of Orange, the 16th-century prince who had led the Northern Netherlands in their revolt against Spanish governance. The Father of the Fatherland, as he became known, had chosen Delft as his residence, and it was there, in 1584, that a political adversary assassinated him. The Nieuwe Kerk remains the place of the final rest of nearly all members of the house of Orange-Nassau including all Dutch monarchs.
In its times, the Nieuwe Kerk was already an object of honor and admiration and destination for thousands of visitors each year, whether Dutch citizens or foreigners. It may very well have been one of the most frequently depicted buildings in the Netherlands.
The row of illuminated gabled rooftops are located on Kethel Street, one of the three streets which branched out, and still branches out today from behind Schiedam Gate. Kethel Street runs perpendicular to the foreground quay.
According to research conducted by Kees Kaldenbach, careful measurements "carried out in the early 1980's show that the interval of these houses mirrors that of the plots of the present day homes (which are each about 4 m. wide). After these measurements were carried out, all of these buildings were sadly demolished. One of the houses had a stone ornament which bore the inscription 1670. In depicting this row of houses Vermeer clearly did copy reality very faithfully."
- Delft's artistic decline
- an empty bell tower
- Thoré-Bürger and the View of Delft
- the Kolk
- how Vermeer's view looks today
- traveling by boat in 17th-c. Netherlands
- Marcel Proust and the View of Delft
- Why did Vermeer paint the View of Delft?
- Dutch pride
- did Vermeer use a camera obscura in the View of Delft?
- Delft draws inward
- listen to Nieuwe Kerk carillon music
Vermeer's View Delft is probably the most memorable cityscape in western art. Though not an interior scene, as most works by Vermeer are, the painting draws us into his mental and social world: into his artistic vision and into his city. What we see seems almost too obvious, too plainly descriptive, too perfectly observed to require comment or analysis: the city of Delft appears before us under the partial clouds characteristic of the North Sea climate, a palpable grouping of brick, mortar, and clay structures seen across the broad Schie canal. It is all there, still nameable today: the Schiedam gate at left, the Rotterdam gate with its twinned turrets at right, the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk, or New Church, picked out in the brightest sunlight, the diminutive tower of the Oude Kerk, or Old Church, just breaking the long roofline at left. The scene's varied light effects look so natural -deep shadow and bright patches, pinpoint highlights and watery reflections -that the eye ignores what the mind knows: that this light is high artifice, that it is a work of painting.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)
Walter Liedtke (Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)
The support is a fine, plain-weave linen with a thread count of 14 x 13 per cm² and selvedges on both left and right sides. Strainer bar marks have resulted from a vertical cross bar and corner braces. The canvas has been lined. The buff-brown ground, bound with oil and some protein, contains chalk, lead white, ocher, a little umber, and a little black.
In het licht van Vermeer. Mauritshuis.
no. 3 and ill.
- Paris 1966
Dans la lumière de Vermeer. Musée de l'Orangerie.
no.3 and ill.
- Paris 1986
De Rembrandt à Vermeer: Les peintres hollandais au Mauritshuis à la Haye. Grand Palais.
350-557, no. 53, ill. (with extensive literature).
- Washington November 12, 1995–February 11, 1996
120-127, no. 7, repro.
- The Hague 25 June – 5 September, 1966
no. III and ill.
- The Hague
28 April, 2012 – 30 June, 2014
Meesters uit het Mauritshuis Zes eeuwen kunst onder een dak.
(Highlights Mauritshuis in Gemeentemuseum The Hague). Gemeentemuseum The Hague.
Vermeer is appointed one of the headman of the Saint Luke's Guild to a term of two years. This fact has been interpreted as a testimony of the high esteem in which the artist was at the time held. However, by the time Vermeer was elected headmaster, many of the painters resident in Delft had left for the more prosperous Amsterdam and so his election may have had less significance than usually thought.
Vermeer and his wife bury a child in the Old Church in Delft. The same document states , Vermeer and his wife were then living in the house of Maria Thins on the Oude Langendijk in Delft. At the time, the household included Vermeer, his wife, his mother-in-law, and three children, not counting an infant who had died and at least one female servant. The house had a basement, a lower hall with a vestibule, a great hall, a small room adjoining the hall, an interior kitchen, a little back kitchen, a cooking kitchen, a washing kitchen, a corridor, and an upper floor with two rooms, one of which was taken up by Vermeer's studio.
Vermeer's family situation was unusual. Very few married men in the Netherlands lived with a parent or parent-in-law for an extended period of time. Vermeer's marriage too, must be considered exceptional in as much as he married outside his own family's religion and social class. He moved from the lower, artisinal class of his Reformed parents who lived on the Delft Square to the higher social stratum of the Catholic in-laws who instead lived in the somewhat segregated "Papist Corner," the Catholic quarter of the city.
The burial of his child is the earliest known record of the artist's residence in Maria Thin's house.
Jan van Mieris is born. Son of the famous Frans van Mieris, Jan painted principally history subjects, but his earliest works were apparently genre scenes in his father's manner.
Jacob van Ruisdael paints Jewish Cemetery. The painting's ruinous, glowering scene exemplifies the trend toward turbulence in Dutch landscape at mid-century.
|european painting & architecture||Diego Velázquez, Spanish painter, dies.|
|music||Alessandro Scarlatti, Italian musician and composer, father of Domenico is born.|
|science & philosophy||
Marcello Malpighi discovers that the lungs consist of many small air pockets and a complex system of blood vessels. By observing capillaries through a microscope he completes the work of Harvey in describing the circulation of the blood.
Robert Boyle announces in New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of Air that removing the air in a vacuum chamber extinguishes a flame and kills small animals, indicating that combustion and respiration are similar processes.
|history||May 28, George I, king of England), is born.
May 29, Charles II, who had fled to France, is restored to the English throne after the Puritan Commonwealth. Charles made a deal with George Monck, a general of the New Model Army, and with the old parliamentary foes of his father. The British experiment with republicanism came to an end with the restoration of Charles II.
Dec 24, Mary I Henriette Stuart (29), queen of England, dies.
The Dutch crafted an early version of a boat they called a "yacht."
1660s The British began to dominate the trade in port wine from Portugal after a political spat with the French denied them the French Bordeaux wines. Brandy was added to the Portuguese wines to fortify them for the Atlantic voyage.
In Dec. Maria Thins, Vermeer's mother-in-law, purchases a grave in the the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft. Originally from Gouda, at this time she probably had come to understand that her son-in-law had become an inseparable part of the family she headed.
Willem Bolnes, brother of Vermeer's wife Catharina, showed up on several occasions at Vermeer's house and made trouble. Several witnesses, including Tanneke Everpoel, Vermeer's servant which some scholars believe to have posed for The Milkmaid, claimed that Willem created violent commotion, causing people outside to come to the front door and listen. He swore at his mother Maria Thins, with whom Vermeer and his family resided, and called her an "old popish swine," a "she-devil," and other words "that could not be decently mentioned." He pulled a knife on his mother and tried to stab her. He also once threatened Catharina with a stick although she was pregnant "to the last degree." The stick, added a neighbor Willem de Coorde, had an iron spike on one end. Tannake prevented Willem from hitting her with it. None of this violence seems to have worked its way into the world of Vermeer's art.
Willem Bolnes, like his father, is prone to moments of uncontrollable violence. He soon after had another serious incident which left Maria Thins with a 74 guilder fee to pay two surgeons and wine necessary to help him recover.
In the estate inventory of an innkeeper named Cornelis de Helt who died in 1661, the first item listed is as "a painting with a black frame by Jan van der Meer."
Rembrandt depicted himself in a painting as the Apostle Paul.
Apr 20, Gerard Terborch, the elder, painter, dies.
Rembrandt paints The Syndics of the Cloth Hall.
Jacob van Ruisdael paints Landscape with Watermill.
|european painting & architecture||
The Tent of Darius by Charles Le Brun, now 42, who has been commissioned by Louis XIV to create a series of subjects from the life of Alexander the Great. Le roi de soleil fancies himself a latter-day Alexander and makes Le Brun first painter to the king, giving him a huge salary.
The Château Vaux-le-Vicomte is completed for France's minister of finance Nicolas Fouquet with a two-story salon. Architect Louis Le Vau has designed the structure (his Collège des Quatre-Nations is also completed this year), and landscape architect André Le Nôtre, now 48, has created its gardens. Le Nôtre will begin work next year on the gardens of Versailles.
|music||The Paris Opéra Ballet has its beginnings in the Royal Academy of Dance (Académie Royale de Danse) founded by Louis XIV|
|science & philosophy||
The Sceptical Chymist by Robert Boyle discards the Aristotelian theory that there are only four basic elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and proposes an experimental theory of the elements. Boyle will be called the "father of chemistry" but he holds views that will encounter skepticism from later chemists, e.g., that plant life grows by transmutation of water, as do worms and insects since they are produced from the decay of plants.
Christiaan Huygens invents a manometer for measuring the elasticity of gases.
Mar 9, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the chief minister of France, dies, leaving King Louis the 14th in full control.
Apr 23, English king Charles II is crowned in London.
Henry Slingsby, master of the London Mint, proposes the "standard solution" a mix of flat rules and free markets, to resolve the ongoing problem of money supply and coin value. Britain adopts the idea in 1816 and the US follows in 1853.
Water ices go on sale for the first time at Paris under the direction of Sicilian limonadier Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli from Palermo. Fruit-flavored ices were originated by the Chinese, who taught the art to the Persians and Arabs
Ever since the powder explosion of 1654, which had caused the death of Carel Fabritius, Delft's community of artists had been shrinking. Many painters had left town, most to settle in Amsterdam, some in nearby The Hague. Vermeer, perhaps because of his close economic ties with his patrician mother-in-law, was the only noteworthy artist to have remained
The artistic traffic was intense both during Delft's heyday as a ville d'art and afterwards. Many out-of-town artists left a trace of their presence when they signed as witnesses at a local notary's office. It is hard to believe, for instance, that Nicolaes Maes and Samuel van Hoogstraten, who both lived in Dordrecht in the 1650s, did not once stop over in Delft on their way to The Hague or Amsterdam, perhaps to talk shop with Carel Fabritius who, like them, had once been a pupil of Rembrandt or, after Fabritius's death, to fraternize with other members of the artists' community. Maes was instrumental in anticipating De Hooch's achievements of the 1650s in rendering realistic interior scenes with finely modulated contrasts of light and dark. Two heads (tronien) by Van Hoogstraten were found in Vermeer's death inventory. Vermeer must also have seen the works of Maes, whose features became part of the visual vocabulary of the Delft School.
In Vermeer's View of Delft, the tower of the venerable Oude Kerk is hardly noticeable, whereas that of the Nieuwe Kerk has been majestically rendered although perhaps a bit too wide. One of the most curious details of the picture, pointed out by art historian Kees Kaldenbach, is that the Nieuwe Kerk's bell tower is empty. Kaldenbach's research has demonstrated that the old set of carillon bells of the Nieuwe Kerk tower had been hoisted down in the spring of 1660 during a restoration headed by the renowned Hemony bellmaker firm. Accordingly, the empty tower points to the year 1660 confirming the painting's date generally proposed on stylistic grounds. Furthermore, Kaldenbach posits that given the full green foliage and the active maintenance works on these ships moored at the shipyard (getting ready for the opening of the legal fishing season on June 1st) it follows that the scene was intended to depict an early morning in the first half of May.
Scientific analysis suggests that the painting was on Vermeer's easel quite some time and was likely finished in 1661 to 1663.
Art French critic Théophile Thoré (who used the pseudonym Thoré-Bürger) is generally accredited of having rediscovered the art of Vermeer in the middle of the 18th century. He began his study of Vermeer with an account of his first encounter with the View of Delft in The Hague, describing it as:
" a superb and most unusual landscape [that] captures the attention of every visitor and powerfully impresses artists and connoisseurs. It is the view of a town, with a quay, old gatehouses, buildings in a great variety of styles of architecture, garden walls, trees, and, in the foreground, a canal and a strip of land with several figures. The brilliance of the light, the intensity of the color, the solidity of the paint in certain parts [produce] an effect that is both very real and nevertheless original."
To Thoré, Vermeer's work embodied the purest expression of what he retained the ultimate purpose of art: to record and honor the activities of the daily life of everyday people thus coloring the aura of the Delft master with his own leftist agenda. Thoré extolled Dutch art for its direct appeal to simple human virtues making it an art for the people ("l'art pour l'homme"). He was, however, not only a man of politics but of great aesthetic sensitivity who admired Vermeer's use of sparkling impasto and pearly luminosity.
Thoré selflessly devoted 20 years of travel and research to his study of Vermeer and as early as 1860 he began purchasing Vermeer paintings. A Lady Standing at the Virginal was acquired sometime before 1876, the Woman with a Pearl Necklace was bought from Henry Grevedon in June 1866. A Lady Seated at the Virginal was purchased for a mere 2,000 francs in 1867. The impact of Thoré's research and interest was enormous. Vermeer rapidly gained a reputation as one of the greatest Dutch artists of the 17th century triggering a buying frenzy of wealthy American businessmen and art collectors who vied to snap up the few Vermeer paintings still on the art market.
Although Thoré's criticism today may appear fastidiously political, his early recognition of the important masters of French 19th-century painting and the Dutch baroque place him at a seminal point in art history. His most important contribution was in the history of taste and collecting, particularly the reevaluation of Dutch artists as well as an early supporter of Impressionism.
The area represented in the View of Delft was known as the Kolk. It took its initial form from a bastion constructed in 1573, when the city fortifications were modernized. In 1614 it was dug up again, creating the present triangular harbor. Both of the gates and the town wall were pulled down in the 1830s and most of the stepped-gables in the painting have been replaced by modern facades. In Vermeer's representation, only the Nieuwe and Oude Kerk have survived even though the present spire of the Nieuwe Kerk dates from 1877. The original wooden spire caught fire when it was struck by lightning five years earlier.
The Kolk was the main point of departure to other cities and to other countries via the Schie and Maas. One could access Rotterdam, Schiedam and Delfshaven as well as the Flanders and Brabant, France, England and to every corner of the world. Vermeer's View of Delft represents the city of Delft as seen from the south. Beyond the harbor lie the deep brown city walls that are broken only by the small Kethel Gate and the larger Schiedam Gate with its clock tower. The Rotterdam Gate is recognizable with its twin tower. None of these architectural features has survived.
It must be said that Vermeer chose a rather uncharacteristic profile of Delft. Traditional cityscapes of Delft generally emphasized its most distinctive landmarks. The Oude Kerk, one of the most venerable monuments of all, can barely be discerned in the distant left center of the composition.
The photograph to the left was taken from a position very near to the point where Vermeer painted the View of Delft, more or less at the same height from the ground. Historians concur that the artist worked from the second story of an inn that has been long since torn down. The scene's peacefulness remains as a memory of times past.
We should remember that the apparent calm of the scene was probably a good deal painter's artifice rather than a fact since this section of Delft was in reality one of the busiest. However, with a little luck, the right timing and a few clouds, (the hour is shown on the clock of the Schiedam gate about 7:15 to 7:30 A. M.) it is hard not to recapture some of the atmosphere of Vermeer's sublime masterpiece. To be sure, the shoreline is still in the right place, the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk still can be seen and a tiny sliver of the bizarre tower of the Oude Kerk peers over the neutrality of the modern skyline.
But even if the expanse of Dutch sky is there and the two key monuments indicate we are correctly aligned, there is something oddly "wrong" about the setting. Standing on the spot where Vermeer worked, everything seems farther, much farther away. Precisely at this juncture, in front of the only fixed point that can be objectively identified and compared with one of Vermeer's painting, we are assailed by the doubt that the painter took great liberties in his interpretation and that his poetry is scarcely fruit of a literal transcription of a long lost world. As usual, Vermeer created a reality whose bits and pieces can be disputed in terms of factual truth but whose artistic "rightness" is overwhelming.
The level expanses of the 17th-century Netherlands were crossed by canals that had been dug to regulate the flow of water, but at the same time doubled as an extraordinarily effective means of transportation, more practical than any way on land. Although the centers of Dutch cities had paved roads, in the back streets and outside the city it was sand, dust and mud. Riding by carriage meant a bumpy and often muddy road. Alternatively, Dutch towns were connected by a network of line services by tow barges (trekschuit), then one of the most advanced public transport systems in the world. They provided scheduled day-time transportation which was frequent, dependable and affordable.
Traveling by barge was a little slower but far more comfortable than by carriage. One could enjoy the view of the landscape, have a conversation with the skipper or read a book while the boat slowly glided through the water pulled by one or two horses. This unique mode of traveling influenced communication within Dutch society as well. Boat travel encouraged men and women from different geographical locations to meet and exchange information and opinions in leisurely freedom. People of diverse social spheres, religions and political persuasions mingled and sooner or later familiarized.
Vermeer no doubt knew the waterways and used them. The service between Delft and The Hague (the administrative capital of the United Provinces and important art center) ran every two hours in both directions taking from one to one and one half an hour to arrive. The Delft-Leiden service is said to have carried 170,000 passengers annually during the 1660s.
In the foreground of the View of Delft one can see a tow barge put into service in 1655 when the line service to Rotterdam was started. Vermeer thus shows us a recent transport innovation in the Delft region.
Behind and to the left of the Rotterdam Gate is most likely the passage eternalized in writing by Marcel Proust in À la recherche du temps perdu.
Proust describes an elderly writer Bergotte who visits a Dutch art exhibit and, while examining a detail of Vermeer's View of Delft, falls ill and dies. That scene, that painting, described as a "Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof" has attracted the attention of a multitude of critics. Bergotte's final thoughts before dying, perhaps more than any other, faithfully reflect Proust's idea of art.
Although not all experts agree on the precise location of Bergotte's "little patch," Proust writer Jeffrey Mayers believes that "the famous little patch of roof (not wall) that the writer Bergotte sees in a moment of epiphany before his death appears just next to the pointed left turret of the Rotterdam gate, amid the warm browns and blues of the stone buildings and tiled roofs, and it provides a golden contrast to the rich red roofs on the right side of the painting."
The View of Delft is Vermeer's largest and most time consuming work of his entire oeuvre, except perhaps for the elaborate Art of Painting. Since nothing has come down to us concerning the artist's intentions in regards this or any other work, art historians have attempted to fill the gap. Walter Liedtke, for example, believes that the view could have been commissioned by Vermeer's patron, Pieter van Ruijven who had collected more than half of the artist's artistic production including the View of Delft. Furthermore, Liedtke points out that Van Ruijven's collection contained three other small scale cityscapes of Delft by Vermeer as well as three architectural paintings by Emanuel de Witte, including a patriotic view of William the Silent's tomb in the Nieuwe Kerk which Vermeer spectacularly highlighted in his view. Van Ruijven would have also been aware of the historically proclaimed relation between an artist's reputation and the fame bestowed on his city.
Dutch citizens strongly identified not only with their republic, but with their city of birth as well. Their civic pride is testified by innumerable Dutch cityscapes many of which are so similar to one another that they are virtually indistinguishable expect a few characteristic church towers or large civic buildings.
The Dutch were enormously proud of their country, their way of live and the cities in which they lived. They wrote richly illustrated city histories that celebrated the achievements of their most renowned citizens and the beauty of their monuments. Large-scale engraved maps were printed which portrayed the city streets, the canals and gardens in extraordinary detail. No people in history portrayed their landscape as frequently and with such attention to detail as the Dutch.
The Dutch were the first to formulate the cityscape as an independent genre of painting. Some art historians believe that the topographical urban motif evolved out of highly developed Dutch cartographic traditions rather than from traditional background scenery in pictures devoted to religious, historical or mythological subjects. Civic officials commissioned the new scenes to record their towns' historic towers and spires, as well as the stately new buildings and imposing fortifications that reflected wealth and authority. Residents bought portraits of their cities on the open market and proudly displayed them in their homes.
Although we do not know why Vermeer the interior painter created such an atypical and time-consuming work as the View of Delft, it is possible that his patron and Delft burger Pieter van Ruijven commissioned it.
While the artist did break the Dutch landscape mold of prominently displaying the town's most important monuments, he did follow the conventional cityscape formulae whereby poverty, litter and slums were completely erased. Nonetheless, Vermeer was too original of a painter to blindly adhere to any established formulae.
In the present work he narrowed his focus to portray the bastions of his native town from a selective view point, on one particular moment while a few sparse cumulus clouds lazily pass overhead casting their shadow over a good part of the composition. Art historians have narrowed that time to about 7:30 (see the clock on the Schiedam Gate) on morning of the month June, 1661. A moment later, the cloud would have moved on and the scene we now see would no longer be as it is in the View of Delft.
Rather than representing a viewpoint which would afford the best panorama of the town and its monuments, Vermeer selected one which would convey a deeper and ,perhaps, more personal sense of identify with his beloved city.
One of the most beguiling aspects of Vermeer's working method was the artist's hypothetical use of the camera obscura, a sort of primitive photographic camera. After an initial positive response of the art community regarding its use, some art historians have moderated their enthusiasm or completely backed away. While they still admit Vermeer was familiar with the workings of the camera obscura, they believe that many of the stylistic characteristics attributed to the camera were conceived independently from the device.
Of course, no documentary evidence indicates whether or not Vermeer actually set up a camera obscura on the second floor of a long-lost tavern where the view point of the View of Delft was located. Much less do we know if he employed it for temporary observation or during the arc of the painting process. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that Vermeer used a camera obscura at some stage in the working process of the View of Delft gained validity because of the distinctive effects of light, color, atmosphere and the curious presence of signature optical effects produced by the mecchanism.
By far, the most convincing trace of the camera obscura image is constituted by the artist's translation of the so-called disks of confusion into painted dots termed pointillés which in the View of DelftView of Delft was too low to produce them in the foreground shadowed passages. Vermeer experts believe he probably availed himself of artistic license regarding the disks of confusion with which he had become familiar with through long hours of camera observation.
Vermeer was not the only painter who knew the camera obscura. Camera obscuras were widely acclaimed in the 17th century for naturalistic images that they created. They present an instantaneous living, image, where movements of clouds, water and birds are visible. Color and contrasts of light and dark are intensified through the use of a camera obscura, thus giving an added force to the image which must have intrigued any painter of the time. In the View of Delft, all of these phenomena are present.
By the time Vermeer reached his artistic maturity, many of Delft's best painters had fled to the rapidly-growing Amsterdam. However, only a few years before Delft had inexplicably attracted some of the rarest talents of the United Provinces. The short stays of Pieter de Hoogh, Paulus Potter, Carel Fabritius, Jan Steen coupled with the permanance of Vermeer the around 1650 gave rise to the so-called School of Delft.
Before their arrival, Delft had been only a minor center of artistic activity. What brought such artists may have been the city's long and venerable history, its lovely streets and quite, aristocratic atmosphere which pulled visitors in from all over Europe. In this quintessential Dutch environment, these painters evidently found the tranquility to forge a naturalistic yet measured art which some art historians have described as classical.
Curiously, the years of Delft's maximum artistic ferment did not correspond to its economic and political climax which had been reached years before. As art historian Peter C. Sutton wrote: "Over the course of the 17th century, Delft drew inward. While occasionally still serving as a theatre for political events, the city gradually surrendered its active role in the nation's affairs. A small group of families espousing aristocratic ideals and orthodox Calvinism came to dominate the civic administration. Wealth remained but was used more and more conservatively. The entrepreneurs were increasingly replaced by more cautious rentiers; while capital could readily be found for high-yield ventures such as those of the Dutch East and West Indies Companies, little money was reinvested in local business. At a time when trade and industry were expanding briskly throughout Holland—and nowhere so dramatically as in Amsterdam—Delft's economic base was vanishing. Its crafts and porcelain manufacture and tapestry weaving remained strong, but many businesses languished. The textile industries, suffering from competition with the English, curtailed their activities or moved elsewhere and by 1667 the city's breweries had fallen in number from more than 100 to 15. Land reclamation and the damming of rivers had transformed Delft from an open port to a virtually landlocked city. Commercial shipping at Delfshaven was increasingly rerouted through the burgeoning port of Rotterdam."