The Little Street

For centuries no one knew which street this was, if it was a real street at all. Then in 2015 a historian went through a Delft tax ledger of 1667 that recorded the exact width of every house and passageway along the canals, down to a few centimetres, and matched it to the two gaps in Vermeer's row of houses. The address is Vlamingstraat 40 to 42. The house on the right belonged to Vermeer's aunt, a widow who sold tripe, and the little alley beside it was known as the Tripe Gate. So this quiet view of brick and shutters, painted around 1658, is family ground, the ordinary street where his aunt lived and worked a short walk from his own front door.