Het straatje van Vermeer: een plaatsbepaling

Abstract

In the autumn of 2015, Frans Grijzenhout published his sensational findings regarding the likely location of Johannes Vermeer’s ‘little street’ (The Little Street). After consulting a variety of sources, including the ‘The Ledger of Dredging of the Canals in the Town of Delft’ from 1666–1667, he had reached the conclusion that the famous painting by Vermeer must have been based on the houses and two intervening passageways that in Vermeer’s day stood on Vlamingstraat, an unassuming canal in the eastern part of Delft, where numbers 40 and 42 stand today. He had also ascertained that one of Vermeer’s aunts, Ariaentgen Claes van der Minne, was the occupant of 42 Vlamingstraat at that time. Several authors have since produced material indicating that Vermeer painted the right-hand house in Little Street ‘from life’: the house was, it now appears, observed and reproduced in meticulous detail. The same can now be confirmed for other aspects, such as the colour used for the painted shutters and the recesses for wind hooks in the sill of the window of the righthand house. Philip Steadman has rightly pointed to an apparent discrepancy of four feet (c. 1.25 m.) between the details in the aforementioned ‘Ledger of the Dredging of the Canals in the Town of Delft’ and the actual spatial situation at 40 Vlamingstraat. This difference can be traced back to the fact that the gateway provided access to both front and back houses. Accordingly, the owners of both front and back houses would have been taxed on the width (four feet) of the passageway. Given what we know about the meticulous precision with which the Ledger was compiled in the case of 42 Vlamingstraat, it is inconceivable that the authors of the register for number 40 should have made a mistake. A spatial rendering based on an earlier perspective study of The Little Street, corresponds surprisingly well, and in some respects in detail, with the cadastral and other information we have about the complex on Vlamingstraat. Steadman’s contention that the back house must have been some twenty metres tall, is not borne out by this reconstruction: the gutter height of this house is between 7.4 and 8 metres. There are no valid reasons for assuming that Vermeer based The Little Street on the Oudemanhuis on Voldersgracht or on the house he and his family occupied on Oude Langendijk, as claimed respectively by Steadman and Benjamin Binstock. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the division of the plane and arrangement of space, and the architectural elements in The Little Street were based purely on an underlying grid of lines with no basis in historical reality, as suggested by Heidi de Mare. Obviously, Vermeer may well, as in the View of Delft, have resorted to artistic licence with elements or relative proportions in The Little Street, but there is more than enough justification for assuming that in making this painting he did indeed draw inspiration from the actual houses and passageways on Vlamingstraat.