The Little Street

About this work

Artist

Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675)

Year

c. 1658

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

54.3 × 44 cm

Collection

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Movement

Dutch Golden Age

Two brick houses on a quiet canal street in Delft, a woman sewing in an open doorway, two children playing on the stoop and, down the passageway, another woman bent over a washtub. Vermeer painted it around 1658 on a canvas barely 54 centimetres high, and it is one of only three views of his home town he is known to have made, with the View of Delft and a lost House Standing in Delft. The whitewash, cracked brick and mended mortar are built up in thicker paint than the figures, so the walls feel almost touchable. In 2015 archival research into the city's quay-dues register identified the site as Vlamingstraat 40 and 42; the house on the right belonged to Vermeer's aunt, Ariaentgen Claes, who sold tripe from the alley beside it. Signed I V MEER below the window, the painting was given to the Rijksmuseum in 1921 by the oilman Henry Deterding.

This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.