View of Delft

The View of Delft is a veduta painting made between 1659 and 1660 by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. It is housed in the Mauritshuis of The Hague. Topographic views of cities had become a tradition by the time Vermeer painted his famous canvas. Hendrik Vroom was the author of two such works depicting Delft, but they are more archaic in that they followed the traditional panoramic approach that can be seen in the two cityscapes by Hercules Seg... more

The View of Delft is a veduta painting made between 1659 and 1660 by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. It is housed in the Mauritshuis of The Hague. Topographic views of cities had become a tradition by the time Vermeer painted his famous canvas. Hendrik Vroom was the author of two such works depicting Delft, but they are more archaic in that they followed the traditional panoramic approach that can be seen in the two cityscapes by Hercules Seghers at the Berlin museum. The latter artist was one of the first to make use of the inverted Galilean telescope to transcribe the preliminary prints and their proportions (more than twice as high as wide) into the more conventional format of his paintings. We admire the town, but it is not a profile view of a township, but an idealized representation of Delft, with its main characteristics simplified and then cast into the framework of a harbour mirroring selected reflections in the water, and a rich, full sky with magnificent cloud... less