The Little Street

Vermeer painted this view of a street in Delft around 1658, looking at the houses across the road from his own house on the Oude Langendijk. He was about 26, and this is one of only two surviving cityscape paintings by him. The other is View of Delft, now in the Mauritshuis. Two brick houses fill the canvas, their facades seen straight on. The house on the left is older, with a cracked wall and a patched roof. The house on the right is newer, with a clean facade and a white doorway. In front of the houses, two women sit on the pavement, one sewing and one working with a bucket. A small child crouches on the ground at the lower left. The street is paved with bricks, and a narrow alley runs between the two houses. The sky is grey, the light soft and even, the kind of light you see in Delft on an overcast day. The painting is one of the most quiet and most observed of Vermeer's works. There is no narrative, no drama, no event. Two women are working, a child is playing, and that is all. The painting is about the act of looking at an ordinary street and finding it worth painting. Vermeer's contemporaries produced thousands of cityscapes and architectural views, but none of them looked at a street with this kind of attention. The houses in the painting were identified in 2015 by a Dutch historian, Frans Grijzenhout, who matched them to houses on the Vlamingstraat in Delft, using a 17th-century tax register. The houses have been rebuilt several times, but the alley between them and the proportions of the facades still match Vermeer's painting. Oil on canvas, 54 by 44 centimeters, roughly 21 by 17 inches. Vermeer painted with a smooth, controlled surface, building the brick walls in thin layers of warm red and brown. The mortar between the bricks is rendered as thin white lines, each one individually painted. The women in the foreground are small, barely 10 centimeters tall, but their poses are specific and their clothing is carefully rendered. The vertical format and quiet subject make this print work well in a hallway, study, or bedroom. The cityscape subject suits a room with neutral walls and minimal furniture. A white frame keeps the painting's soft palette clear. The 12x16 or 16x20 size gives the brickwork and the figures enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This is a public domain artwork (CC0). We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.