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Vermeer and the Delft School
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Description
Some forty years before the French art critic Théophile Thoré "discovered" Vermeer, Sir John Murray wrote of The Little Street: "The whole is touched with that truth and spirit which belong only to this master." Murray's claim is supported by the picture's extraordinary passages of description and of observation in the case of details the painter actually saw (he probably combined and modified motifs from different houses in Delft). At the same time, no work by Vermeer reveals quite so clearly as this one his interest in the work of Pieter de Hooch. As in that artist's courtyard scenes and certain pictures of the 1650s by Fabritius, Potter, Pynacker, Van der Poel, and Vosmaer, Vermeer carefully combined naturalistic incidents—the effects of age, weather, constant use, and so on—with a Dutch classical design. It is not at all illogical to discern in Vermeer's approach a devotion to direct experience and lessons learned from contemporary artists. These complementary aspects of The Little Street and the slightly later View of Delft (Mauritshuis, The Hague) must have been appreciated by the Delft collector Pieter van Ruijven, who owned both pictures in the 1660s as well as architectural views of Emanuel de Witte and other local painters.
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Description