The Little Street
Johannes Vermeer (1632 to 1675) · About 1658
Two old brick houses on a Delft street, a passage between them, and a sky of grey and white cloud. A woman sits sewing in a doorway, another bends over a tub in the passage, and two children crouch at play on the pavement. Nothing else happens. Vermeer painted only two views of his town, and this one, quiet as a Sunday, has become the image of what Dutch domestic life is supposed to have been: clean, orderly, modest and warm.
The subject is ordinary but the picture is not. Look at the brickwork, where the mortar lines are painted one by one, at the whitewash repaired over old cracks, at the shutters in three colours and the vine climbing the wall on the right. Vermeer moved things about to make the composition sit: the houses are pushed to the edges and the passage becomes a vertical of light in the middle, echoed by the open door on the left and the sky above. The figures are small and half turned away, so the buildings become the real portraits. The light is the calm overhead light of a cloudy day, without shadows, which makes every surface show its texture.
For a long time nobody knew which street was shown. In 2015 an archivist used a tax register of Delft canals, which listed the width of each house front, to argue that these are the houses at Vlamingstraat forty and forty two, opposite a bridge, where an aunt of Vermeer sold tripe. The painting was bought by the industrialist Henri Deterding in 1921 and given to the Rijksmuseum, so that it would not leave the country. Stand close and you will see how thinly the sky is painted and how thick the bricks are, as if Vermeer built the houses rather than painted them.
Did You Know? The houses have been identified as Vlamingstraat forty and forty two in Delft, where Vermeer's aunt ran a tripe shop.
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