In the 350 or so years since Johannes Vermeer captured the everyday 17th-century Delft scene of The Little Street, one question has remained: where is it? Now a leading Dutch art historian says he knows.
The answer, according to Frans Grijzenhout, professor of art history at Amsterdam University, came from trawling through detailed contemporaneous records kept by the city in the southern Netherlands. These allowed him to pinpoint the only houses of the time that could match Vermeer’s famous scene, even though very little of them remains.
So significant is the apparent discovery about one of only two surviving outdoor scenes by Vermeer, better known for his intimate portraits of domestic life, that it is the basis for an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which owns the painting. The exhibition will, fittingly, transfer to Delft’s Museum Prinsenhof next year.
“The answer to the question as to the location of Vermeer’s The Little Street is of great significance, both for the way that we look at this one painting by Vermeer and for our image of Vermeer as an artist,” said Pieter Roelofs, curator of 17th-century paintings at the Rijksmuseum.
While various theories had been suggested for the location of the painting over the years, Grijzenhout was the first researcher to consult an arcane document from 1667, about a decade after the work was painted.
Officially known as De legger van het diepen der wateren binnen de stad Delft, or the ledger of the dredging of the canals in the town of Delft, it recorded how much tax various house owners had to pay for dredging their local canal and maintaining the quay. As part of this, it detailed the width of each house and their associated passageways, accurate to within 15cm.
Grijzenhout’s research found that on the north side of Vlamingstraat, a narrow canal in eastern Delft, sat two houses of about 6.3 metres wide, with a pair of adjacent passageways about 1.2 metres wide. Correlating this with other archive materials about gardens and the position of houses, Grijzenhout concluded that nowhere else in Delft at the time matched the painting.
The original houses are long gone, although one passageway remains. In their place sit numbers 40 and 42 Vlamingstraat, built in the late 19th century.
The research found that in Vermeer’s picture, the house on the right belonged to the painter’s widowed aunt, Ariaentgen Claes van der Minne, who provided for her five children by selling tripe. The passageway adjoining the home was known as the Penspoort, or Tripe Gate.
A Rijksmuseum statement added: “We also know that Vermeer’s mother and sister lived on the same canal, diagonally opposite. It is therefore likely that Johannes Vermeer knew the house well and that there were personal memories associated with it.”
