Baroque and Rococo

 

VERMEER





Veiled Emotions



 

Vermeer
View of Delft
c. 1660-61
It is thought that this view of Delft was painted from the upper storey
of a house. Contrary to the practice of veduta painters, who were interested in
topography and would have painted the town in its entirety, he painted only a
small section. It is safe to assume that Vermeer was making a deliberate political
point in the way he painted sunlight breaking through the dark clouds and striking
the buildings in the background. The Nieuwe Kerk is brightly lit; since shortly after the
turn of the century it had housed the tomb of William I of Orange, a monument
steeped in national symbolism.
 

The City and the Streets

Vermeer twice painted aspects of his home town of Delft. One such painting, kept in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is the small picture generally known as Het Straatje (Street in Delft); the other is the considerably larger View of Delft, in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Views of towns were not often painted for general sale in Holland, most of these pictures being official or private commissions. The prices that they fetched frequently greatly exceeded those paid for uncommissioned landscapes. In 1651, for instance, Jan van Goyen received the sum of 650 guilders from the city elders for his view of The Hague. The average price for ordinary landscapes has been shown in research carried out by J. M. Montias to have been about 16.6 guilders.2 The auction catalogue of the pictures sold after Vermeer's death, on 16th May 1696, includes number 32, a view of Delft estimated at 200 guilders; this is a comparatively high price. It has been assumed that Vermeer planned his View of Delft using a camera obscura. Willem Blaeu's 1649 Atlas, which contains town plans of Delft, has been used to identify the precise point, the upper storey of a house, from which Vermeer painted this picture. A relatively high viewpoint can be inferred from the angle at which we look down at the group of people on the banks of the Schie. The gentle diagonal of the river bank in the foreground is a compositional feature that can also be seen in Esaias van de Velde's View of the Zierikzee. It was Pieter Bruegel the Elder who first introduced this triangular piece of shoreline into Dutch landscape art.
Taken as a whole, however, Vermeer remains faithful even here to the basic principle that informs his interiors, that of strong linear structures. It is his preference for this orthogonal type of composition that differentiates his View of Delft so strongly from town views such as those by Gerrit Berckheyde and Jan van der Heyden; they attempt to reveal the secret life of the town by such means as streets that disappear into the background.
Vermeer also attempted to give his painting a unifying colour scheme. Ochres and browns predominate, occasionally highlighted by red and yellow accents, such as the slate roofs that, depending on the positions of the clouds, are partly lit by the sun. Jacob van Ruisdael aimed at similar light effects in the middle distance. In Vermeer's picture, the closer parts of the fortifications, such as the Schiedam Gate, are in deeper shadow, whereas the more distant buildings in the centre, including the soaring tower of the Brabant Late Gothic Nieuwe Kerk, gleam with an almost unreal brightness. It is safe to assume that Vermeer was making a deliberate political point by doing this, because the Nieuwe Kerk had, since 1622, housed the monument, made by Hendrick de Keyser, to William of Orange. William had been assassinated in the Prinsenhof in Delft in 1584, and was held in great respect by the citizens of Delft for his heroic role in the resistance to Spanish rule.
The dark buildings near the banks of the river are studded with tiny, granular dots of colour that make the cracks in the brick walls and the hulls of the ships such as the one near the crane on the right positively shimmer, breaking up their dark bulk. This aesthetic aspect of the picture is directly linked to the image seen through the camera obscura which Vermeer was using. So his topographical view of Delft can even, to a certain degree, be termed abstract, as the optical phenomena associated with this instrument - such as particular types of reflections and refractions and a lack of focus - are reproduced here at several points.
Vermeer was just as interested as Jacob van Ruisdael in the ever-changing clouds, which constantly altered the light falling on his subjects; and time plays an important role in this picture, too. The overall impression, paradoxically, is of calm and a lack of activity, however; this is undoubtedly linked to the near-deserted appearance of the place.

Vermeer
View of Delft (detail)
 

The Street in Delft , which was probably painted at a somewhat earlier date, also conveys the impression of a timeless, silent lack of motion. We see, directly parallel to us on the other side of the road and beyond the rows of cobblestones, a brick facade with deep-cut, embrasure-like gables, which are lower on the left, forming a link to the neighbouring house. The gables and roofs of buildings further away can be seen over the connecting wall. Most of the house's shutters are closed, which almost gives the impression that the house is sealed off from the outside world. Our only view of the interior is through the open front door, where we can see a woman busy lace-making; beyond her, all is dark. The gateway to the yard has been repaired in a rather rough and ready fashion, and through it we can see a narrow passageway where a maid is busy at a water butt or something similar. This is a motif that was to gain prominence in the work of Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin. The two women, who are completely involved in their housework tasks, are anonymous. The maid is partly turned away, so that we cannot make out her face, while the features of the seated woman are little more than a blob of paint framed by the white of her bonnet, upper garment and pillow lace; this colour is continued through the coarse whitewash of the lower part of the facade. It is not possible to make out the faces of the two children kneeling on the ground in front of the house. It is also not clear what they are doing. They are probably engaged in the same sort of activity as the children one sees in Dutch 17th-century church interiors, helping to dig tiles out of the floor.
 

Vermeer
Street in Delf
1657-58

The facade of the house runs parallel to the frame in this painting.
Vermeer paid special attention to the signs of ageing on the coarsely whitewashed brick facade.
Though the overall impression is one of silent immobility,
there is plenty of movement in the clouds passing overhead.
 

There is no communication between the few people in Vermeer's Street in Delft. Their quiet activities are all separate and independent of each other; nonetheless, we are invited to notice the parallel, simultaneous nature of these activities. The effect is similar in the somewhat earlier 1658 painting by Pieter de Hooch called Maid and Child in a Courtyard (now in the National Gallery, London). Vermeer was probably familiar with this painting. On the left, the lady of the house can be seen in the hallway that leads onto the street; on the right, quite separately, her young daughter is stepping out of a shed with the maid.
 

Pieter de Hooch
Maid and Child in a Courtyard
1658
Pieter de Hooch (1629-1683) worked in Delft for a time, and was also a painter of domestic scenes.
It is likely that Vermeer was familiar with his paintings, including this scene set in a back courtyard;
we can see straight down the hallway to the lady of the house,
who is watching whatever is happening out on the street.
 

Vermeer
Street in Delf (detail)
1657-58

Children at play
Earlier Dutch artists, such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, were very precise in their depiction of children at play,
which for them had a moral purpose; in contrast, on Vermeer's painting,
we are left in doubt as to what exactly the children are doing.
 
     

Vermeer
Street in Delf (detail)
1657-58
 

Vermeer
Street in Delf (detail)
1657-58