View of Delft is a famous oil painting made by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. Johannes Vermeer was good at painting the domestic interior scenes of middle class life. He was considered as a successful provincial genre painter. Girl with a Pearl Earring is one f his representative works. Among his few paintings, View of Delft is one of the best works. Delft is a well-known place in Vermeer’s hometown.
View of Delft
As we know, Johannes Vermeer worked very slowly and with great care, it took much time for him to finish a work. There were not so many art works he left to us, but most of them were painted in bright colors, such as blue and yellow. His masterful use of light in his work had been received great popularity. The painting of Delft by Vermeer was a good example.
Vermeer depicted Rotterdam gate on the right side of the painting View of Delft, which was composed of magnificent main building and the bridgehead twin towers. The cable bridge before the city gate attracted the eyes of the audience to the shipyard far away on the right side. Vermeer placed the Schiedam gate on the center of the screen, and Kethel gate was on its left side. Walking through the gate was the Schiedam dock. The fuzzy part of Vermeer’s works was clearly presented in this painting: Kethel gate, Schiedam gate and the Twin Towers across the river.
Vermeer rarely expressed his personal life and emotion in his oil paintings so people know little about him. The information we knew was that his father was a small hotel owner and an art collector. Vermeer lived in a relatively rich family so that Vermeer did not paint for a living. Unlike majority of Dutch painters had to auction their works at the agora, public building and their studios, Vermeer earned money and necessities from an art patron who purchased his artworks regularly. Therefore, Vermeer only needed to painted two or three pieces of works and then did whatever he liked. As a result, themes of his paintings were wide-ranging without much earthly contrivance, far away from the public and the personal life. View of Delft was created in this circumstance and became his masterpiece.
