Veduta di Delft

Johannes Vermeer painted his home town from across the water around 1660 to 1661, and we can date it that closely because of the bells. The tower on the right is the New Church, and its carillon was hung by the Hemony brothers between the spring of 1660 and the autumn of 1661, exactly while Vermeer was at work. So this is Delft at a very specific moment, seen in the flat morning light after rain, the town in shadow and the sky doing most of the living. Almost nobody else in Dutch art painted a city like this, so still and so particular. Its most famous admirer came much later. Marcel Proust saw it in The Hague in 1902 and called it the most beautiful painting in the world, and in his novel a dying writer stumbles to an exhibition to look one last time at a little patch of yellow wall in it and collapses in front of the picture. If you look along the sunlit roofs on the far bank, you can find the small warm touches of paint he meant. The whole town of Delft is here, but Vermeer left himself out of it.