A tall brick house with a stepped gable. A woman sewing in the doorway. Two children kneeling on the pavement, absorbed in a game. Down a narrow alley, another woman bends over a barrel. Above it all, a big white sky.
For centuries, people wondered where exactly Vermeer had set up his easel.
Johannes Vermeer, The Little Street, about 1658. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The detective work
Vermeer painted only two views of his home town of Delft, and this is one of them. Because so much of old Delft has been rebuilt, nobody could agree on where the little street was. Scholars suggested at least half a dozen addresses.
In 2015, the art historian Frans Grijzenhout went looking somewhere unexpected: a 1667 register of a tax paid by property owners for dredging Delft's canals. It recorded the width of every house and every passageway along the water. Only one place matched the painting: two houses with two side-by-side passages, at what is now Vlamingstraat 40 and 42.
One of those houses belonged to Vermeer's aunt, Ariaentgen Claes van der Minne, who sold tripe for a living. The woman in the alley may be her, or someone like her, washing something in the barrel at the end of a working day.
Ordinary walls, painted with love
What makes the painting so moving isn't the architecture. It's the patience: the crumbling whitewash, the bricks repaired in different colours, the vine climbing on the left. Vermeer looked at a very ordinary street the way most people look at a cathedral.
Look at your own street
- Next time you walk home, stop on the opposite pavement and look at your building, or any house on your street, for one full minute.
- Notice the materials: brick, stone, plaster, wood. Where have they been repaired?
- Look for one sign of the people inside: a plant, a curtain, a bicycle.
- Imagine someone painting it three hundred years from now. What would they want to keep?
- Take three breaths before you go in.
For more, read why Vermeer painted women reading letters, or how to fall back in love with your city.
Keep the places paintings take you
The Collector's Diary is a free printable zine for remembering your encounters with art: where you met a painting, what you noticed first, and how it made you feel.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi