View of Delft

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.

Mariët Westermann, "Vermeer and the Interior Imagination," Vermeer and the Dutch Interior

c. 1660-1661
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1661-1663
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.

The composition was built up in light and dark passages. The sky, foreground, and light parts of the water are laid in with lead white while the town and its reflection were left in reserve. Some parts of the townscape are underpainted with black. A rough surface texture was created in many places, particularity in the stone facades, and in the roofs, by underpainting with lead white containing exceptionally coarse pigment particles mixed with sand. The fine yellow ocher paint of the step gable at left contains transparent rounded particles of sand.

* 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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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.

Despite its decline, Delft remained an important city of passage that many artists occasionally visited. It contained many fine collections that a local painter could easily have access to. And if he wanted more, he could always take a seat in an inexpensive horse-towed barge and glide in comfort to The Hague, Amsterdam, Leiden, or Rotterdam reachable in less than a day. All the major towns of Holland were connected through a dense network of canals, along with barges that traveled back and forth according to a tightly-ordained schedule. Ease of travel helped to keep the country ideologically and artistically compact.

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 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 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 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 believed to be 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 remaining 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 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 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 and 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 "wrong"about the setting. Standing on the precise 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.

View of Delft from the Northwest (detail)
Hendrick Cornelisz.Vroom
1615-34
71 x 162 cm
Gemeente Musea, Delft

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 were 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.

Marcel Proust

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 generally strongly identified not only with their republic, but with their city of birth as well. Their pride is endlessly 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.

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. Following the conventional cityscape formulae, poverty, litter and slums are entirely absent in Vermeer's rendition. However, he was too original of a painter to blindly adhere to established formulae. 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 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 city and its monuments, Vermeer selected one which would convey a deeper and perhaps more human sense of identify with his city than civic pride.

Preludio V in C [1.78 MB]
Matthias van den Gheyn

performed by:
Marianna Marras, Nieuwe Kerk Delft, 1995.

from:
CARILLON DELFT
Bespeeld door drie Delftse beiaardiers http://www.carillon.org/cd/pages/delft_1.htm

One of the most enticing aspects of Vermeer's working methods 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, some art historians have moderated their enthusiasm. While they still admit Vermeer was familiar with the workings of the camera obscura, they believe that some 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 actual painting process.

Nevertheless, the hypothesis that Vermeer used the camera obscura at some stage in the working process of the View of Delft has gained validity because of the distinctive effects of light, color, atmosphere and diffusion of highlights present in various passages of the composition.

Perhaps, the most convincing features of the camera obscura image, the pointillés, or spherical point of light, can be found in abundance in Vermeer's view. They teem along the lower side of the large right-hand barge creating an extremely evocative image of shimmering reflections of light off the water. However, is should be remembered that the camera obscura produces a dark image in low lighting conditions which is useless for the practicing painter. Furthermore the device requires great contrast to create pointillés of any kind. Certainly, the light represented in the View of Delft would not have been sufficient to produce them so Vermeer experts believe he availed himself of artistic license in order to create the artistic effect he had in mind.

Vermeer was not the only painter familiar with the camera obscura. Camera obscuras were widely acclaimed in the 17th century for naturalistic images that they created. They present a living, instantaneous image, where movements of clouds, water and birds are visible. The apparent realism, however, is also consequence of the vividness of the image. 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. Contrasts of light and dark are pronounced, colors are vivid and atmospheric perspective is negligible.

In today's world flooded with images, it is not easy to understand the impact the camera obscura image could have provoked in a world where all images were deliberately and tediously made by hand. Contemporary literature relates some of the magic that accompanied camera obscura viewing that we can no longer imagine.

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 it had inexplicably succeeded in attracting some of the rarest talents of the United Provinces. The short stays of Pieter de Hoogh, Paulus Potter, Carel Fabritius, Jan Steen and others around 1650 briefly overlapped giving rise to the so-called School of Delft.

Before their arrival, Delft had been only a minor center of artistic activity. What attracted 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."