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| “The Little Street” Oil on canvas, c.1658 - c.1660 Rijksmuseum |
Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) didn't paint many landscapes. He was known mostly for his genre paintings or interior scenes of daily life and a few portraits. As for landscapes, we know only of two.
Like most people, I was drawn initially to Vermeer by the luminosity of his color and the beautiful light that seems to drench his interiors. “Woman Reading a Letter” and “The Milkmaid” are two of my favorites. A soft, lambent light pervades each scene, allowing the colors, especially the blues, to glow with an inner richness.
I didn't know about his landscapes until some time later. They are similar to his interiors in that they show a mastery of color. What's most interesting, though, is that they show a level of near-photographic detail and realism not found in his interiors. We don't really know for sure, but some art historians believe that Vermeer used an optical aid, such as a camera lucida or camera obscura, to help in constructing his paintings.
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| View of Delft Oil on canvas, c.1660 - c.1661 Mauritshuis |
In my mind, “View of Delft” is an unimaginative landscape although well-constructed. It fits a model that will be used for the next few hundred years, all the way to John Constable and beyond: four horizontal planes consisting of sky, city, water and a dry place to stand on. The dark boat on the right is balanced by the figures on the left. There is one strange thing, though, and that is the heavy cloud mass above. It is dark enough that it unbalances the painting on the vertical axis and seems, well, ominous—a contrast to the idyllic scene below. I think that Vermeer was hoping for less sky, but this was the only canvas he had, and he had somehow to fill up that empty region toward the top. We landscape painters run into this problem when we want to paint a vista but have on hand only a squarish canvas. His painting works better with a crop, as here:
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| "View of Delft" - Cropped |
The most “modern” of his two landscapes, and my favorite, is “The Little Street.” One doesn't see many vertically-oriented paintings of buildings from this period. Plus, the scene is tightly-cropped, slicing off the right part of the building, putting the focus on the figure in the doorway on the bottom right. It's almost like a snapshot, and it brings to mind how the French Impressionists used photographic references in their paintings. You almost have to jump to the 19th century to see this kind of design. The painting also tends more to the monochromatic than any of Vermeer's other works and consists mostly of dull brick-red and tints of yellow ochre, with the only contrasting color being a tiny patch of dull blue in the sky.
