The Little Street

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

c. 1657-1658
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1659-1651
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)

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Although there is nothing to indicate how wide the street is, we get the impression that the painter's point of view (which is our view) is from a house opposite, from an upstairs room, at no great distance. Topographical experts and local historians in Delft have spent much time trying to pin down where this was. The Oude Langendijk, the Nieuwe Langendijk, the Trompetstraat, the Spieringstraat, Achterom, the Vlamingstraat, and the Voldersgracht are among the numerous streets put forward for the honor.

The most consistent candidate has been the Voldersgracht where Vermeer was probably born. Some years later, Vermeer's father moved his family from the Flying Fox inn a few a doors west and rented a spacious inn called Mechelen. Thus, the view we see may be from the back of that inn (the façade overlooked the busy Markt, the heart of Delft) looking over a small canal which faced the Old Mens' Home.

What makes the location of this work even more vexing to identify is the fact that it may, from a literal point of view, never have truly existed as the way Vermeer chose to portray it. For 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.

Pieter de Hooch, an innovative artist who was working in Delft at the time, pioneered everyday scenes remarkably for their clarity of perspective and harmony of light on which Vermeer based his Little Street. For example, even though the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk appears background of his A Dutch Courtyard (see left), it is unlikely that this view ever existed or that the exact location of the courtyard could be found. Other elements snatched from previous paintings are dispersed liberally around the composition in order to construct the most suggestive scene possible.

A Dutch Courtyard
Pieter de Hooch
1658/1660
69.5 X 60 cm
National Gallery of Art,
Washington D. C.

Nieuwe Kerk, Delft

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.

a detail of Vermeer's View of Delft

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.

The Oude Kerk on the Oude Delft in Delft (detail)
Jan van Heyden
1675
45 x 57 cm
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo

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.

Emblem from Roemer Visscher's
Sinnepoppen, Houghton Library
Harvard University

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.

A Woman Reading a Letter and a Woman Sweeping
Pieter Jansessens Elinga
Städelsches Kunstinstitut
Frankfurt am Main

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 only image of the façade of
Mechelen dates from an engraving
of c. 1720 by Leonard Schenk.
Mechelen was one of the largest
constructions on the Market Square.

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 St. Luke's Guild 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 of their sentimental relationship.

A Dutch Courtyard
Pieter de Hooch
1659-60
70 x 60 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington

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.

Rustic Cottage
Dirk van Lann
whereabouts unknown

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 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."

Vermeer's artistic temperament seems to have suited his conservative Delft. 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.

Street Scene with Bakery
Jacobus Vrel
Oil on panel
Private Collection, New York

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 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.

Antonio Vivaldi
Le Quattro Stagioni, op 8, no 1 "La Primavera," Largo [1.29 MB]
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