Little Street Johannes Vermeer

The Little Street by Johannes Vermeer, oil on canvas 1657-1658, is a sunny landscape painting of cobblestoned street, building facades, and women performing chores in Vermeer’s home city of Delft. The fine details of red brick houses, glasswork, vines and stucco are painstakingly executed against a backdrop of blue sky and clouds. In this compelling street scene Vermeer moves from his typical domestic interior to its exterior landscape. Johannes (Jan) Vermeer (1632 - 1675) was a Dutch master painter of interior genre scenes whose works were rediscovered in the 19th century. In carefully constructed, geometric compositions drawn in meticulous linear perspective, Vermeer explored the effects of light and colour across human figures, objects and textures in sunlit, domestic rooms, building upon the optical discoveries and 3D perspectival depth of Leonardo and the Renaissance. Both a painter and an art dealer, Vermeer slowly produced a few of his painstakingly executed, richly pigmented compositions per year, living entirely within his home city of Delft, eschewing the fame of his near contemporaries Rubens and Rembrandt that he achieved finally in the modern era.