The Little Street(Het Straatje
c. 1657 - 1661
Oil on canvas
54.3 x 44 cm. (21 3/8 x 17 3/8 in.)
One of the most touching details in Vermeer's oeuvre is that of the two children absorbed in their play in the Little Street. Although they occupy a small portion of the painting, the magical atmosphere that pervades the work would be deprived of much of its intimate warmth without their presence. As is befitting of Vermeer's enigmatic nature, neither the children's faces nor their play is revealed. We can only surmise that the darkly-dressed child wearing a broad brimmed hat seen in profile would likely be a boy while the attire worn by the other indicates a girl. By turning their backs to us and hiding whatever might be their secret activity, the artist stimulates the viewer to explore the thoughts and emotions of his own childhood. Thus, we become an active participant in the picture's silent narrative and completing it as a work of art.
Once out of their swaddling clothes children in the 17th century were dressed virtually as miniature adults. This practice may reflect a lack of recognition of the child's individuality, at least, in respects to the modern standards. Both boys and girls generally wore the same ankle-length dress (the boys until about 5 to 7 years of age). Clothes were expensive so hand-me-dowm clothes were the norm. Contemporary portraits of children prove how difficult it is to determine the gender of children before breaching unless a name is available. Many children wore "pinafores," or a kind apron pinned to the front of over elaborate frocks as protection.
European upper classes usually placed their children under tutors and governesses. Many parents would begin those lessons when the children reached about 3 years of age. Contemporary letters and diaries show that education was commenced so early and with such intensity that it was not unusual for a child of 4 or 5 to be able to read, write, and understand several languages.
The poignancy of Vermeer's sublime image becomes more evident if we remember that Vermeer himself would have had eleven children: Maria, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Johannes, Gertruyd, Franciscus, Catharina, Ignatius and one child whose name is unknown. Four had died in infancy or early childhood.
The scene that Vermeer depicts is fully shaded by overhead clouds which would seem to be cumulus clouds lit by the sun shining from the left. The chief pigment of the blue sky is the now defunct blue azurite, the most common blue found on the palette of 17th-century Dutch painters. Thee clouds are executed with delicate but rapid diagonal brushstrokes of white with small admixtures of red ochre and azurite
Glue size, which is stickier than natural drying oils generally used to make paint, was often employed as a binder to hold the azurite pigment grains firmly in place. It was necessary to apply several coats of azurite to produce a solid blue, but the result was quite beautiful. The actual thickness of the crust of blue added to the richness of the effect, and each tiny grain of the powdered crystalline mineral sparkled like a minute sapphire, especially before it was varnished. Due to the coarseness of azurite, it was difficult to use in detail. The same blue was often used as a cheap base color for the more expensive natural ultramarine, a precious blue pigment made of crushed lapis lazuli.
The rows of worn cobblestones which slowly converge towards the vanishing point are essential to create a reasonable sense of depth and break the stifling flatness of the main façade which dominates the picture plane. It would appear that soapy water streams down from the servants wash basin into a gutter which runs along the wall that divides the properties of the adjacent doorways. The water must have then flowed into a canal just out of view to the bottom of the composition. Directly in front of the main building's doorway is a shallow platform decorated with diagonally placed ceramic tiles.
Delft was laced with a fine network of canals which were, even in the 17th century, one of the principal features of this town. In fact, Delft's name derives from "delven," which means to dig. European travelers frequently noted that the Dutch were fanatically clean. Each morning the home owners would give a thorough washing of the street in front of their properties. It was said that Delft's canals were so clean that the water could be used for making beer, a visitor once remarked that the floors of Delft's houses were so clean that one could eat off them without a plate. The famous Delft scientist Anthony van Leeuwenhoek commented that he had the gutters of his house thoroughly cleansed two times a year.
Although Vermeer's view may be enjoyed for its lifelike description which seems to transport the viewer back to the mid-17th century, the work is not without symbolic references.
A fully-clothed maid is shown washing laundry over a wooden barrel at the end of the anonymous private alleyway, one of the hundreds in Delft. An unused broom stands nearby waiting to be taken up and wielded over pavements and floors and with legendary gusto. In the 17th century, sweeping and booms had solid associations with spiritual cleanliness and purity. The concept domestic virtue was essential to the Christendom and Dutch nationhood.
Infrared reflectography reveals that Vermeer had initially included a seated woman doing handiwork at the entrance of the alleyway. He later painted her out at an advanced stage of the work perhaps because she obstructed the passageway and ruined the effect of three dimensionality so crucial to the success of the composition.
Sprawling grape vines can be seen in a great number of Dutch cityscapes. Although Dutch light was so weak that the grapes failed to produce drinkable wine, they must have been kept for their decorative effect. Since Antiquity, vines have symbolized fidelity and marriage and in the context of this work, domestic virtue. However, we cannot presume that Vermeer had attached any symbolic meaning to them in the present work.
The curious blue tinge of the foliage has been attributed to the loss of a transparent yellow glaze painted over the blue leaves which originally would have given the leaves their proper green color. This particular glaze method (yellow lake over ultramarine blue) must have been common since the same defect appears in the works of other Dutch painters as well, especially those of the still life painters.
The elderly woman who quietly vigils over the scene is doing some kind of needlework, possibly sewing judging by the large piece of clothe on her lap. She seems to be the only aged person in the artist's oeuvre even though such figures were common stock among Dutch painters of the time. Sewing, like spinning, was an attribute of domestic virtue of Biblical origin. Thus, Vermeer's picture represents a real situation which becomes a model of behavior. However, the work is so utterly natural in its appearance that the viewer never feels the weight of didacticism or moral finger-waving.
In the Netherlands, differently from the rest of Europe, the home began to become charged with hitherto unknown importance. Its ideal was often embodied in an emblem from the popular emblem book Sinnepoppen by Roemer Visscher. The illustration shows a turtle in his shell, a creature who never leaves his shell, captioned "T'huys best," or as still said today, home is best. The virtuous household also held political significance as it was regarded as "the seed of the state."
Despite the scene appears so convincingly realistic, Vermeer must have taken considerable artistic license in order to achieve the work's unique poetic contents. In the original version, this striking red shutter was absent.
According to architectural historians, Vermeer depicted a house which dates from the second half of the 15th or the beginning of the 16th century. It was not the kind of luxurious townhouse inhabited by the privileged elite of Delft but a dwelling for modest folk. It had high ceilings, well-lit rooms and unusual step gables probably making it one of the surviving medieval houses of the time.
The area where the house stood was evidently spared by the Great Fire of 1536 which had destroyed a considerable slice of Delft. It shows numerous signs of repainting and patching of cracks which may have been inflicted by another civic calamity, the infamous Thunderclap of 1654, when an ammunitions magazine exploded killing hundreds of inhabitants.
Even though everyone who has seen the picture from life is astonished by the real appearance of a single place, more than one art historian believes that Vermeer drew liberally on components he observed in various buildings in order to create the one we see in the picture. This 17th-century "copy-and-paste" practice was hardly an anomaly. Pieter de Hooch, for example, painted two courtyards in Delft which are nearly identical at first glance except for their varied architectural features. This kind of technical contrivance would have been in itself admired by contemporary viewers as a sign of painterly artifice and craftsmanship.
Nonetheless, Vermeer's house remains, perhaps, the most naturalistic townscape in Dutch painting. Even though it is rendered with breath-taking attention to detail, the finished image shares little with the dry topographic tradition of current landscape painting. Furthermore, the main building is unusually off-center and cropped off on the top as well. The sense of closeness and frontal focus forces a point of view from which viewer cannot escape. Thus, it is unlikely that it had been conceived as a commemorative "portrait" of a specific house rather than a slice of daily, domestic 17th-century life. The French artist and writer Eugène Fromentin wrote that if there ever was a portrait of Holland, the Little Street epitomizes it.
Vermeer expert Arthur Wheelock pointed out that the buildings in the painting have no specific architectural features, wall plaques or signs, and no church spires rise in the background that permit the present-day viewer to locate them with surety. Vermeer's view is "less about Delft, or even a small fragment of a streetscape in Delft, than about the poetic beauty of everyday life."
Vermeer's characteristic signature above to rustic benches.
- where is Vermeer's scene?
- Vermeer's childhood
- the public lives of Dutch women
- 17th-century tourism in Delft
- Dutch children
- Dutch homes
- a view from the back of Mechelen
- the inspiration of Pieter de Hooch
- a "fake" Vermeer cityscape
- Vermeer: a conservative painter for a conservative town
- Jacobus Vrel, follower or precursor?
- painting bricks
- schilderachtig and Vermeer's house
- listen to period music
Time, halted for this instant and therefore in a sense for eternity, seems to be his essential subject. Its wear and tear is visible in the bricks and mortar, the fabric of fact that bluntly underpins our tenuous and temporary hold with its many unanswerable questions, such as 'What are we doing here?' And yet according to some art historians the picture is also about the ideals of domestic virtue: the grape-vine symbolizes love and marital fidelity. Psalm 128 says: "Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house." Catharina was often "full and sweet" as the Dutch described the state of pregnancy. And Vermeer allows for this sense of development in his painting. Unlike de Hooch, who freezes his figures for once and for all, he gives us the feeling that at any moment the woman in the doorway will put her sewing or embroidery away and call to the children; time for some food. And the servant will come in from the passageway and help in the kitchen.
Vermeer: A View of Delft, Anthony Bailey, 2001
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 14 per cm² The original tacking edges are present and marks from the original strainer bars are 3.5 cm. from the edge on all sides. Of the two lining canvases one is probably attached with glue/paste, the other with wax resin.
The gray ground visible along the silhouette of the right house and in parts of the brick façade contains umber, a little chalk and lead white. Coarse particles of lead white protrude through the thin paint layers of the façade and in the brown shadows. Along the left edge of the painting secondary cusping is evident.
The sky was underpainted with lead white, over which the chimneys on the v-shaped-roof line were painted. Azurite was used in the underpainting of the three upper windows, including sills and surrounds, of the right house, followed by a creamy yellow layer. The sequence of paint layers is reversed in the ground-floor windows of this house. The foliage was painted with an azurite and lead tin-yellow mixture, three different shades of an ultramarine and lead white mixture, and pure ultramarine.
* Johannes Vermeer (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis - Washington and The Hague, 1995, edited by Arthur Wheelock)
- (?) Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, Delft (d. 1674);
- (?) his widow, Maria de Knuijt, Delft (d. 1681);
- (?) their daughter, Magdalena van Ruijven, Delft (d. 1682);
- (?) her widower, Jacob Abrahamsz Dissius (d. 1695);
- Dissius sale, Amsterdam, 16 May 1696, no. 32 or no. 33; Gerrit Willem van Oosten de Bruyn, Haarlem (before 1797);
- his widow, Haarlem (d. 1799), Van Oosten de Bruyn sale, Haarlem, 8 April 1800, no. 7, to Van Winter;
- Pieter van Winter, Amsterdam (1800-1807);
- Lucretia Johanna van Winter, Amsterdam (1807-45);
- Jonkheer Hendrik Six van Hillegom, Amsterdam (1845-47);
- Jonkheers Jan Pieter Six van Hillegom and Pieter Six van Vromade, Amsterdam (1847-99/1905);
- Jonkheer Willem Six van Wimmenum, Amsterdam (1905-19);
- Jonkheer Jan Six, Amsterdam and 's-Graveland (1919-21);
- Six sale, Amsterdam 12 April 1921, to Sir Henry Deterding;
- his gift in 1921 to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. A 2860).
- Amsterdam 1872
Katalogus der tentoonstelling van schilderijen van oude meesters. Arti et amicitiae.
22, no. 143.
- Amsterdam 1900
Catalogus der verzameling schilderijen en familieportretten van de heeren jhr. P. H. Six van Vromade, Jhr. J. Six en jhr. W. Six. Stedelijk Museum.
17, no. 71.
- London 1929
Exhibition of Dutch Art, 1450-1900. Royal Academy of Arts.
149-150, no. 316 and pl. 80.
- Amsterdam 1935
Vermeer tentoonstelling ter herdenking van de plechtige opening van het Rijksmuseum op 13 july 1885. Rijksmuseum
28, no. 165 and ill. 165.
- Rotterdam 1935
Vermeer, oorsprong en invloed. Fabritius, de Hooch, de Witte. Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen.
36, no. 83 and ill. 64.
- Paris 1950
Le Paysage hollandais au XVII siècle. Orangerie des Tuileries.
- Brussel 28 April, 1946
De Hollandsche schilderkunst van Jeroen Bosch tot Rembrandt. Paleis voor Schone Kunsten.
- London 1952
Dutch Pictures 1450-1750. Royal Academy of Arts.
vol 1: no. 529, 2: ill. 13.
- New York 1954
Dutch Painting: The Golden Age. An Exhibitio of Dutch Pitcures of Seventeenth Century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Rome 1956
Le XVII siècle Européen. Réalisme classique baroque. Palazzo delle Esposizioni.
246, no. 31 and pl. 28.
- Tokyo 2 August – 14 December, 2008.
Vermeer and the Delft Style. Metropolitan Art Museum.
172-174, no. 26 and ill.
- Rome 27 September, 2012 - 20 January, 2013
Vermeer. Il secolo d’oro dell’arte olandese. Scuderie del Quirinale.
206, no. 46 and ill.
Maria Thins, in the first draft of her testament, leaves to Vermeer's daughters jewels (wrings bracelets and gilded chains) and the sum of three hundred guilders to Vermeer and Catharina.
In the same testament Maria Thins wills to Vermeer's first child, Maria, 200 guilders. The child's name is an almost certain sign of good will that existed between Vermeer and his mother-in-law.
In Nov. 30 Vermeer and his wife were lent the sum of 200 guilders from Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven, a wealthy Delft citizen and art collector who may have purchased in the following years more than twenty of Vermeer's works. This money may have been a kind of advance payment on the purchase of future works. Van Ruijven is now rightly considered Vermeer's patron. He was almost seven years older than Vermeer and seems to have had a personal relation with Vermeer that went outside the usual client/artist relationship.
Feb. the framemaker Anthony van der Wiel, who had married Vermeer's sister Gertruy, registered at the guild as an art dealer.
Frans Snyders, Flemish painter, dies.
Both Pieter de Hoogh and Vermeer began to paint the genre interiors refining a regional type, lending it a more realistic qualities of space, light and atmosphere.
The Dortrecht landscape artist Aelbert Cuyp borrows warm light and hilly scenery from Italian examples.
|european painting & architecture||
Diego Velázquez paints Las Hilanderas (The Spinners)
The Corsini payed Guercino 300 ducats for the Flagellation of Christ painted in 1657. Guercino was remarkable for the extreme rapidity of his execution - he completed no fewer than 106 large altar-pieces for churches, and his other paintings amount to about 144. In 1626 he began his frescoes in the Duomo of Piacenza. Guercino continued to paint and teach up to the time of his death in 1666, amassing a notable fortune.
|music||Le Sieur Saunier: Vencyclopdie des beaux esprits, believed to be first reference book with "encyclopédie" in its title.|
|science & philosophy||
A pendulum clock was designed by Christiaan Huygens and built by Solomon Coster.
Universal Mathematics (Mathesis Universalis) by John Wallis amplifies the English mathematician's system of notation, applying it to algebra, arithmetic, and geometry. Wallis will be credited with inventing and introducing the symbol for infinity; he has demonstrated the utility of exponents, notably negative and fractional exponents
Mar 23, France and England formed an alliance against Spain.
Jun 1, first Quakers arrived in New Amsterdam (NY).
A 4-year Dutch-Portuguese war begins over conflicting interests in Brazil, but Johan de Witt will end the hostilities with a peace advantageous to the Dutch.
Coffee advertisements at London claim that the beverage is a panacea for scurvy, gout, and other ills.
Public sale of tea begins at London as the East India Company undercuts Dutch prices.
The Flushing Remonstrance written to Nieuw Amsterdam's governor Peter Stuyvesant December 27 is probably the first declaration of religious tolerance by any group of ordinary citizens in America.
The first London chocolate shop opens to sell a drink known until now only to the nobility.
In this period, the Guild of Saint Luke was probably the center of Vermeer's public life.
Vermeer may have began distancing himself from his family or origin. This fact is seen in his failure to name any of his children after his mother or father as was common practice of the time. His first two daughters, born before 1658, Were named Maria and Elizabeth after his mother-in-law and her sister.
In Vermeer's Procuress a Chinese bowl appears in the still life. Between 1602 and 1657 the Dutch had imported millions of pieces of porcelain. Native Delft artisans began feverishly producing everything from elaborate imitations of Chinese porcelain to the humble floor tiles seen in some of Vermeer's interiors.
Pieter de Hooch: paints Courtyard of a House in Delft, one of finest works. De Hoogh's courtyards may have influenced Vermeer's The Little Street.
Frans van Mieris paints The Duet.
Adriaen van de Velde paints Farm with a Dead Tree.
|european painting & architecture||Bernini: church at Castel Gandolfo (-1661). Bernini did not build many churches from scratch, preferring instead to concentrate on the embellishment of pre-existing structures. He fulfilled three commissions in the field; his stature allowed him the freedom to design the structure and decorate the interiors in coherent designs.|
|music||Apr 22, Giuseppe Torelli, composer (Concert Grossi op 8), is born in Italy.|
|literature||Moliere was anointed with the patronage of King Louis XIV. Molière left behind a body of work which not only changed the face of French classical comedy, but has gone on to influence the work of other dramatists the world over. The greatest of his plays include The School for Husbands (1661), The School for Wives (1662), The Misanthrope (1666), The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666), Tartuffe (1664,1667,1669), The Miser (1668), and The Imaginary Invalid (1673).|
|science & philosophy||Amsterdam naturalist Jan Swammerdam, 21, gives the first description of red blood cells. He will complete his medical studies in 1667 but devote himself to studying insects, tadpoles, frogs, and mammals rather than practicing medicine.|
|history||Sep 3, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the New Commonwealth, i.e. ruler over England’s Puritan parliament, dies at age 59. Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as English Lord Protector.|
Around 1659 or 1660, Vermeer's brother-in-law Willem Bolnes left his irascible father's house in Gouda to live on one of the family's properties in Schoonhoven. Willem incurrs in debts and borrowing money from his mother, Maria Thins, since his father had become too impoverished to help. Willem apparently had no kind of work. He was later to become a serious problem for Vermeer and his wife.
In the late 1650s Vermeer, paints two exceptionally luminous interiors, inspired by genre models of the time. In both Officer and Laughing Girl and The Milkmaid he uses his famous "pointillist" technique (thick points of light colored paint in the most intensely light areas of the composition called pointillés. This technical artifice conveys a sense of brilliancy rarely seen in any other of his works. Vermeer never again painted a humble sitter, such as the common milkmaid.
Jan van der Weff is born. Johan Willem, Elector Palatine, whom he had met in 1696, appointed him Court Painter in 1697 at a salary of 4,000 guilders on condition he work for him six months of the year. In 1703 this was increased to nine months, and he was made a knight. He remained in Rotterdam, making trips to Düsseldorf to deliver pictures and paint portraits.
Jan Janz de Heem ( d. 1695) is born. Son of the celebrated still life painter Jan Davidsz de Heem he was baptized on 2 July I650 in Antwerp. From 1667 to 1672 he worked in Utrecht with his father who sometimes retouched the son's work. There has undoubtedly been much confusion between the work of father and son. Jan Jansz is last recorded in a document of 1695.
|european painting & architecture||1659-1661 Michael Sweerts, Flemish painter, created his rosy Portrait of a Youth.|
|music||Mar 7, Henry Purcell, English organist, composer (Dido & Aeneas), was born. Purcell was one of the greatest composers of the Baroque period and one of the greatest of all English composers. He wrote fantasias for viols, masterpieces of contrapuntal writing in the old style, and some at least of the more modern sonatas for violins, which reveal some acquaintance with Italian models. In time Purcell became increasingly in demand as a composer, and his theatre music in particular made his name familiar to many who knew nothing of his church music or the odes and welcome songs he wrote for the court.|
|literature||Oedipus (Oedipe) by Pierre Corneille 1/24 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, Paris|
|science & philosophy||
Christiaan Huygens of Holland used a 2-inch telescope lens and discovered that the Martian day is nearly the same as an Earth day. He also discovers the rings of Saturn. He also constructs a chronometer for use at sea; however, it is influenced by the motion of the ship and does not keep correct time.
English physician Thomas Willis, 38, gives the first description of typhoid fever.
Elementa curvarum by Jan De Witt gives an algebraic treatment of conic sections using the newly developed analytic geometry. It appears as part of an edition of Schooten's Geometria a Renato Des Cartes.
|history||The Spanish infanta Marie Therese introduces the French court to cocoa, which will be endorsed by the Paris faculty of medicine and received with enthusiasm until it becomes surrounded with suspicion as an aphrodisiac in some circles and as a mysterious potion in others.|
Vermeer is appointed one of the headman of the Guild of Saint Luke 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.
Adriean Coorte is born. Coorte devoted himself to the precise rendering of simple objects in small paintings. His paintings often have strong illumination that gives the composition an enchanting stil
|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 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.
Jan Steen paints Easy Come, Easy Go.
|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
In the past, the most consistent candidate for the location of the painting had been the Voldersgracht where Vermeer was probably born. Some art historians had proposed that despite the scene's realistic appearance, it could simply be a distillation of typical architectural elements gathered and adroitly woven together within the privacy of the artist's studio.
However, the century-old question of the exact location of Johannes Vermeer’s Little Street has finally been solved by Dr. Frans Grijzenhout, professor of Art History at the University of Amsterdam. The setting for painting is on Vlamingstraat in Delft, where houses 40-42 now stand. Searching though 17th-century records in the Delft archives Grijzenhout searched and found the conclusive answer in the Register of the quayside feers within the city of Delft from 1667. This register records how much tax those who owned a house on a canal in Delft had to pay for the deepening of the canal and for maintenance of the wharf in front of his door. It contains detailed, accurate up to 15 cm., information on the breath of all the houses and ports on the Delft canals in Vermeer’s time.
The research also revealed that Vermeer’s aunt—the widow Ariaentgen Claes van der Minne, Vermeer’s father’s half-sister—lived in the house on the right side of the painting. Vermeer’s mother and sister lived on the same canal, diagonally across the street. It is therefore likely that Vermeer knew the house well and had personal memories linked to it.
The two children playing together in Little Street is the only depicted testimony of childhood in Vermeer's oeuvre.
Very little is known about the artist's early days. His parents were married in 1615 in Amsterdam before Jacobus Taurinus, a famous Calvinist and Orthodox Reformed Church Minister. It seems probable that his parents belonged to a sizable group of people called liefhebbers (supporters), or those who for one reason or another did not comply with the strict requirements of membership or had a dislike for religious discipline.
Vermeer was baptized on 31 October 1632 in the Reformed Church (in the Nieuwe Kerk) in Delft. Because of the age gap with his sister, Gertruy, born 12 years earlier, Vermeer may have been something of an only child. But like all other children he must have ice skated in the winter, hit kolf balls with a stick and gone fishing in one of the many canals of Delft noted for their pure water. He also took part in the yearly cycle of public festivities which gave children healthy opportunities to let off steam.
Vermeer's family background would be described today as lower middle-class. His grandparents were illiterate and so was his mother. He spent his childhood in a large house which his father Reynier bought after having improved his economic situation. Reynier was evidently a hardworking man who lived and invested conservatively.
In the Netherlands, the family unit was small and insular in orientation with an average of three or four children. Close relatives, such as grandparents, rarely shared the home. Children were treated by their parents with a respect and understanding unusual for the times. They received their moral instruction in the home, where they generally lived until their mid to late twenties.
Other than the Milkmaid and The Little Street (as well as the tiny stand-in figures in the View of Delft), Vermeer avoided addressing the mundane, day-to day work routines or the public life of his women concentrating instead on moments of reflection (reading and writing), courtship or music making.
Foreign travelers who visited the Dutch Republic were impressed by the remarkable prominence of women in public places. Not only were they commended for their dedication to the family, Dutch women were reportedly independent and capable entrepreneurs, conducting business either in their own name, or that of their absent spouses. To what extent these frequently repeated observations reflect historical reality is still not clear.
From a legal point of view Dutch women enjoyed conspicuous advantages over their European counterparts. They could inherit and bequeath property and if they were wronged during their marriage, they had legal recourse. Vermeer's mother-in-law was able to obtain a conspicuous slice of her husband's wealth after years of physical and moral mistreatment. Adultery, unusual abuse or willful desertion could bring separation of "table and bed" effectively annulling the union. Upon marriage, an inventory was made of the capital which was brought into the marriage by both parties. After the dissolution of the marriage the initial sum would be returned to the original family. Gains and losses made in the mean time were most often shared, but the wife had the option of choosing, after her husband's death, whether or not to share in profit or loss.
Women could also make commercial contracts and notarized documents and, in effect, were qualified to undertake commercial activities. Some, which came from renowned trading families, were highly respected. But the most enterprising of women in the business world were married women or widows who carried on the business of their husbands. On a lower level, a host of Dutch paintings exhibit Dutch women manning shops and markets stalls.
Vermeer's grandmother, Neeltge Goris, was active as "uijtdraegster" or second-hand goods dealer, liquidating estates of deceased people. Paintings were frequently a part of these estates.
By the late 1650s when Vermeer painted the Little Street, Delft had become an important tourist attraction. People flocked from all parts of the Netherlands and abroad to see the city's public and religious buildings as well as the tomb of William the Silent, an elaborate marble construction dedicated to the father of the United Republic assassinated by Catholic Frenchman Balthasar Gérard.
Destiny had transformed another Delft tragedy into a tourist attraction as well. On Monday, 12th October 1654, in the morning at half-past ten the civic gunpowder magazine exploded and leveled several parts of the town to the ground, more than one hundred people were killed and many more wounded. The explosion was so strong that it slammed shut doors in near bye towns and was said to have been heard as far away as the island of Texel, seventy miles north of Delft. Once the news had traveled, compassionate dignitaries and common Dutch folk alike came to witness the tragedy. But not long after, the damage had become yet another a tourist attraction.
Although the proud and industrious citizens of Delft made every attempt to restore the damage as quickly as possible, signs of the disaster remained. Ironically, this tragic event yielded a new market for townscape views of the devastated areas. A close neighbor of Rembrandt's illustrious pupil Carel Fabritius, the painter Egbert van der Poel, survived but lost his daughter and most likely other family members. Van der Poel would depict for several years a healthy number of views of the disaster as a sort of souvenir of the event sometimes showing the actual explosion and sometimes the aftermath even though we do not know if he really witnessed the disaster. He later became known as the painter of fire.
Eventually, the Delft town council had decided not restore some buildings lest the people might forget. It is likely that some of the cracks on the building to the right in the Little Street were caused by the explosion.
Delft was also visited for its pleasant ambience, the intimate scale of its public and private spaces as well as the tree-lined canals. Just as today, the town offered many strolls past well-maintained stores and private residences.
Travelers to the Netherlands were surprised and disconcerted by the gentleness with which children were treated. There was too much kissing and cuddling going on. Even the custom of giving young children a good-night kiss was looked down upon by the sterner Calvinists. Some historians have theorized that European parents unconsciously distanced themselves from their children since infant mortality was so high. In response to those who thought they were too indulgent towards their young, Dutch parents were reported to have said, "Does anyone spoil their own face or cut off their nose?"
However, the situation was decidedly different for poor children and orphaned children. For them, child labor was normal far before the age of ten, and their education was largely neglected by the workshop masters. In Delft, children from the orphanage were put to work in a textile shop and their work environment was so appalling that many children died.
In any case, Low Countries had a long tradition of depicting children in their paintings. Jan Brueghel dedicated a large-scale work of scores of children at play which constitutes a sort of encyclopedia of children's games of the time. While Vermeer may have not had Brueghel's masterwork in mind for this picture, he was nonetheless aware of the Flemish tradition.
From both an anthropological and architectural viewpoint, the home had acquired enormous importance in the second half of 17th-century in the Netherlands. Scenes of domesticity flourished and women were among the most frequent depicted subjects. This new household became the responsibility and spiritual realm of the woman while the public world, divided cleanly from it for the first time, belonged to the man. Painted interiors displayed women engaged in homemaking, housewifery and nurturing, all fundamental values connected with the virtues of family life.
However, unlike his colleagues, Vermeer represented no families, children or elderly people except for bit parts in the Little Street and the View of Delft.
The most probable location of the Little Street is at Voldersgracht. If this is true, Vermeer painted the view of the Little Street looking across the small canal from the back side of the second story of his father's inn, Mechelen.
Judging from contemporary engravings Mechelen must have been a rather large house which certainly afforded ample space for the public-house business downstairs, for the trade in works of art and for "caffa" finishing. Vermeer's busy father was registered at the Guild of Saint Luke as an art dealer and was also known to have worked in "caffa," a fabric similar to satin which was largely used for upholstery, clothes and curtains. Mechelen no longer exists even though there is an erroneous commemorative plaque on the side on the building which was adjacent to it. Today, the alley is wider. The only image of the façade of Mechelen dates from an engraving of the early 18th century by Leonard Schrenk.
On the occasion of Vermeer's wedding in 1653, the address registered was the house Mechelen, the register also notes that his future wife, Catharina Bolnes, "lived there too." John Michael Montias maintains that it is highly unlikely that Catharina Bolnes, who, on her mothers side was from a devout Catholic family, would have actually lived with Vermeer in Mechelen before her marriage. Montias believes the clerk must have made an error. However, it has been recently advanced the idea that Catharina had gone to live with Vermeer thus forcing Catharina's mother, Maria Thins, to accept de facto their sentimental relationship.
Without a doubt, no painting reveals Vermeer's debt to Pieter de Hooch more than the Little Street. A few years earlier, De Hooch had single-handedly conceived a new type of cityscape which was far removed from the panoramic or topographical cityscapes of his colleagues. Here, domestic virtues, the silence of daily life and the timeless routine of household work, so cherished by the Dutch people, are played out on a stage of humble stone, brick and mortar.
However, Vermeer proved time and time again that he was one of the rare masters who was able to see great potential in the works of lesser painters. In the Little Street, rather than the value of human existence, it is time itself, halted for eternity by the painter's brush, that seems the essential subject.
Dirck Van Laan's Rustic Cottage (see left) was wrongly held to be an authentic Vermeer by none other than Thoré-Bürger, the French art historian who is considered to be the rediscoverer of the master. Van Laan's painting cannot be considered a forgery because the artist probably had not even the slightest idea that his work would later be attributed to Vermeer.
In the annual Paris Salon of 1866, the event which had catalyzed the public attention around Vermeer's then unknown art, the Rustic Cottage was shown along with other authentic and inauthentic works by the artist. Not only was it a favorite among the public but it was also held to be one of Vermeer's best works by connoisseurs alike. Zacharie Astruc singled it out for its studied simplicity. "One hears voices," he wrote. "What intimate existence, and how well expressed." Van Laan painted a variant of the work which is even more similar to Vermeer's Little Street.
In relation to the laid-back atmosphere in Delft, art historian Peter C. Sutton wrote: "The conservative spirit seemed to be reflected in the layout of the city itself. Whereas most 17th-century Dutch towns were a tangle of narrow streets and alleyways, Delft had a clearly organized ground plan since the Middle Ages. A regular system of canals and streets, meeting at right angles and forming a grid culminated in the large rectangular marketplace, where the Nieuwe Kerk and Town Hall still stand. The dominant impression of the city, then as now, was of long vistas bordered by low brick dwellings. In his Journal de Voyayes of 1665, Balthasar de Monconys observed, 'Les rues sont toutes si droictes et si regalières, qu'on sçait d'abord tous les endroits.' Delft's chronicler, Dirck van Bleyswijk, also claimed that Delft was the cleanest of all Dutch cities. The town's neat and orderly appearance, so suited to the mentality of the inhabitants, found its clearest expression in the works of De Hooch and his colleagues."
The conservative atmosphere of Delft seems to have suited Vermeer's artistic temperament. He cannot be considered a particularly innovative painter and he seems to have stimulated negligible change in the artistic environment which surrounded him. He was a professional late-comer of sorts whose work presents no revolutionary or provocative content. He embraced the basic theoretical tenets of the art of his time and fully adhered to common technical procedures of his school even though he worked outside the conventional history painting idiom which, however, had been long abandoned by most Dutch painters.
Vermeer identified himself with his native culture. His canvases are a direct confirmation of the moral and social values held by the majority of his fellow Dutchmen. His political allegiance is amply demonstrated by the maps of the Dutch Republic which populate his works, in particular, by the exquisite treatment reserved for the map of the Netherlands which proudly hangs as the backdrop in The Art of Painting. In the early Officer and Laughing Girl, the carefully integrated relationship between the figures and the map expresses not only an unmistakable pride in the homeland but also the communion between the people who live there and enjoy the fruits of peace. Moreover, he portrayed the highest cultural and scientific achievements of his countrymen without a trace of irony.
In particular, Vermeer identified with his native Delft. Anyone who has had the chance to directly view the View of Delft or The Little Street cannot deny the empathetic treatment of these subjects. No doubt, Vermeer was the cleanest painter in Delft and he may have been its most loyal as well. While almost every other painter had left Delft by the late 1660s for the prosperous Amsterdam, Vermeer remained bound to his beloved birthplace until the day of his premature death.
Although Vermeer was "celebrated" in his own time among a circle of elite art collectors, the mark he left on his contemporaries and later painters is remarkable thin. There exists no evidence that he ever had an apprentice and not a single one of his many children was sufficiently inspired by his work to take up brush and paint. One of the few artists who has been linked to Vermeer is Jacobus Vrel, an enigmatic figure who has only recently gained recognition. Vrel remains one of the most charmingly idiosyncratic minor-masters of his time. Some viewers have assumed that he was only an amateur or "Sunday" painter.
Nothing is recorded of Vrel's life, his name surviving solely through the signatures on some of his paintings. His slim oeuvre includes 38 sparse interiors and quiet street scenes. They all show a fresh, almost naïve treatment that is much in agreement with modern sensitivity.
Some of his paintings are signed or bear traces of signatures that were altered to read Johannes Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch, with whose paintings Vrel's work was often confused. Indeed, Thoré-Bürger, the French art critic who "rediscovered" Vermeer in the 1860s, had discussed Vermeer's status as a townscape painter largely on the basis of works that were actually by Vrel.
An autodidacte, Vrel is stylistically connected to the Delft and Amsterdam artists Pieter de Hooch, Johannes Vermeer and Pieter Janssens Elinga but some authorities consider it likely that he lived in a provincial town rather than a major art centre. Elements in his street scenes may indicate connections to Haarlem, Friesland, Flanders, or the lower Rhineland. His only dated painting, from 1654, suggests that, rather than following, Vrel anticipated Delft artists' interest in domestic themes and light effects. However, the early appearance of two of his works in the inventory of the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria proves that he was well enough regarded in his day to have attracted the attention of the archduke's curator, the renowned Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger. The date on his Interior with a Woman at a Window is 1654, and proves that he dated paintings four years before any known dates on De Hooch's Delft-style interiors or courtyards.
Since the outset of his career, Vermeer shunned the microscopic detail of the obsessive fijnschilder (fine painter) technique of his colleagues from Leiden. By comparison, Vermeer's painting is broad and simple and although there are passages of exquisite technique, detail is always subordinated to the impression of the whole.
Another hallmark of Vermeer's approach to painting technique was his search to achieve the maximum visual effect with the most economic pictorial means. In the Little Street, for example, he was able to accomplish a very life-like effect of worn masonry with the simplest of procedures. Instead of painting individual bricks one by one, he first laid in with a large brush a more or less uniform layer of thick reddish-brown paint on the part of the building's façade covered by bricks. Here and there he introduced a hint of gray to avoid producing a mechanical effect. Once dry, he carefully defined the mortar between the bricks with a thin line of light gray paint. Later, a few bricks were heightened with orange to create some sense of relief while others are darkened to give a weathered appearance.
Curiously, even the earliest reference to this picture describes it as a "house" rather than a "street." As in few other Dutch townscapes, the intimacy of domestic life prevails over mere architectural features. This sentiment must have been shared even some 300 year ago by all who saw it. For in those times, Vermeer's house was not the kind of luxurious townhouse that was going up on the fashionable Oude Delft but a modest house from a distant past which had somehow resisted the misfortunes of the city, old but not dilapidated.
To anyone who gazed upon the Little Street in 17th-century Netherlands the now unfamiliar Dutch term, schilderachtig, would have come to mind. Schilderachtig, which means "picture worthy" or "worthy of painting" corresponds fairly well to today's picturesque. However, it should be remembered that in the 17th century, Italian concepts of art weighed heavily upon European painting, one of which was that the worth of a painting was indivisible from the value of its subject. Accordingly, an old woman, a dilapidated farmhouse, a village peasant scene or Vermeer's humble house would have drawn sneers since only grand Biblical or historical narratives were truly worthy of great art.
But Dutch painters, many of who styled themselves as little more than artisans, paid more attention to the art market than to art theory. Given that they worked free from aristocratic or ecclesiastic pressure, they were able to pursue subjects to which they were naturally attracted or that proved themselves immediately salable, however high or lowly the subject might be.
Schilderachtig, therefore, implied values close to the Dutch such as rustic simplicity, naturalness and a love for the unadorned. The idyllic world of the past as well as curious unusual or even ugly had become worthy of the painter's attention. Rembrandt could find an audience for the old run-down farm houses outside of Amsterdam and Vermeer an old house along a secluded Delft canal.
Le Quattro Stagioni, op 8, no 1 "La Primavera," Largo [1.29 MB]