A n early pair of pictures painted by Vermeer for the house on the Oude Delft can be identified from the Amsterdam auctioneer’s catalogue of 1696. The first vanished without trace after going under the hammer and is now presumed lost. The second is in the collection of the Rijksmusem and has long been known as “The Little Street.” It was probably painted in about 1660.
Numerous failed attempts have been made to locate the scene depicted in the painting, which has been variously identified as a view from a rear window of the Mechelen Inn, a depiction of step-gabled houses on the Voldersgracht, a topographical record of buildings on the Nieuwe Langendijk, and (in laborious detail) a portrayal of the house on Vlamingstraat once owned by a great aunt of Vermeer’s named Ariaentgen Claes van der Minne, a tripe butcher who cleaned and prepared pig’s intestines on those same premises.
The chasing of such wild geese is unnecessary. Vermeer was not a topographical artist, a painter of random buildings represented for the sake of picturesque effect or as family mementos. His pictures for Pieter and Maria van Ruijven, his principal patrons, spoke to their religious convictions. So if he were to create a picture of a particular place to hang on the wall of their house, that place would have to be infused with religious significance for them. In all of Delft there was only one location that Vermeer could have thought, or been asked, to paint for his patrons. “The Little Street” depicts the hidden Remonstrant church on the Oude Delft, together with the houses adjacent to it, including that of Pieter and Maria themselves. Comparison of the picture with the present and past topography of the town bears this out.
“A great deal has changed in Delft since Vermeer’s lifetime, but the corner occupied by the church is still much as it was when he painted it.”
A great deal has changed in Delft since Vermeer’s lifetime, but the corner occupied by the Remonstrant church is still much as it was when he painted it. The canalside houses that he depicted have been remodeled but they are still in situ and the church itself is still there, albeit deconsecrated. Although it was rebuilt in the 19th century it occupies the same footprint as the building where Vermeer and his patrons probably worshipped, and is similar in appearance to it, being a modest two-story structure large enough for a congregation of about 400 people. It remains hidden, even more so now than in Vermeer’s time, because the gap between the houses in front of it has been built over. Having originally been converted from a malting house set behind the main street frontage, possibly with funds provided by the Van Ruijven family’s brewing business, it exists in the same relationship to the façades of the houses along the canal as it has for centuries. To get to it you have to pass through a door set into the street front, which leads to an alleyway of about 20 yards in extent. At the end of that alley is a second door, which lets you into the church.
Nearly all of this is visible in Vermeer’s painting and what is not can be inferred. On the left of his composition at street level we see a weathered black door set into a rounded arch. Behind it is the alleyway, blocked from sight but architecturally implicit, that still leads to the church today. The church itself is the foremost of the buildings in the left middle distance of the picture, behind the street façade. Its roof slopes at the same angle and has the same square-topped gable as that of the church that has replaced it. In Vermeer’s painting, the diagonal formed by the eaves of the church bisects the section of brick wall above the square-topped archway belonging to the house next door. The concealed alley leading to the hidden schuilkerk is mirrored by an open passage running alongside the neighboring house. The entrance to that passage is a square-topped archway with no door, through which we can see a woman with a broom.
The same arrangement of buildings, on the exact spot of the Remonstrant church, is recorded in a map of Delft published by the cartographer Joan Bleau in 1649, about 11 years before Vermeer painted his picture. When mapping the houses on the northeast side of the Oude Delft between Butter Bridge and Pepper Street, a substantial block, Bleau registered a single alleyway piercing the street façade and giving pedestrian access to the buildings behind. As his map shows, that alley’s function was to act as a conduit to the hidden church. Despite working on a tiny scale, the cartographer even managed to indicate that the canalside entrance to the passage was guarded by a door set into a round-topped arch: the same black door that Vermeer painted.
Behind the large house to the right of the church, Bleau placed a patch of green. Dead center of Vermeer’s painting a few sprays of foliage creep out from behind the left edge of that same house, at tree height, hinting at the presence of a concealed garden in the place indicated by the mapmaker.
In the picture, as most likely it was in reality, the house with the garden is a grand one, with many tall windows of leaded glass and a castellated façade. Dwelling and warehouse combined, it would originally have been the residence of a merchant who needed access to the canal for loading and unloading goods. It must already have been about 100 years old when Vermeer recorded its appearance, to judge by its architectural style and weathered brickwork. The house survives in a reduced form and altered, without castellations but preserving its original stepped shape. It is described in the Dutch state register of historical monuments as a high-gabled warehouse with many windows, of late 16th-century construction. While similar to the building in Vermeer’s picture it is not identical, which is hardly surprising given the centuries separating then and now.
This was a type of building once common on the Oude Delft. A three-story mansion of similar size and design, including the same castellated façade and the same tall, thin central doorway, once stood in the same street less than 100 yards away on the opposite side of the canal: the topographical painter Jan van der Heyden included it in his view of “The Oude Delft Canal and the Oude Kerk” of 1675, now in the National Museum in Oslo. The house in Van der Heyden’s picture may have been erected by the same builder-speculator responsible for the house in Vermeer’s painting. But the possibility cannot be ruled out that the painter borrowed elements of the building just down the street, such as its castellations, to make his own depiction of a merchant’s mansion seem a little smarter. Pictures of particular places need not be faithful in every detail, as Canaletto’s views of Venice demonstrate.
“One thing made particularly clear by the painting, now that its location has been identified, is just how intimately the home of Vermeer’s main patrons related to Delft’s church of the Remonstrants.”
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e know that Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and his wife lived in a grand home next door to the hidden church, so it might be assumed that the tall red castle of a house given such prominence in the picture was theirs. But it was not. The Golden Eagle is on the other side of the picture, immediately to the left of the black door leading to the church, cropped in such a way by the edge of the composition that less than a quarter of it is visible. While the big red house is open to the world and full of activity, with a woman at her work in the alley, children playing on the front step and another woman sewing in the doorway, this other house seems a more private place, and all the more tantalizing for that. If only we could walk into the picture and peer through the leaded panes of its windows, we would see paintings by Vermeer hanging on the walls inside. Just below those windows there is a rectangular patch of whitewash on which he has emphatically signed his name, in bright red paint.
One thing made particularly clear by the painting, now that its location has been identified, is just how intimately the home of Vermeer’s main patrons related to Delft’s church of the Remonstrants. Strictly speaking Pieter and Maria’s house was (and still is) not next to the church but directly in front of it, like a porter’s lodge. Anyone going to service would have had to walk through part of their property to get there. Vermeer has emphasized the commonality between the two buildings by making both seem inconspicuous and reticent. Pieter and Maria’s house is shown as little more than an inscrutable fragment bearing the artist’s monogram, while the Remonstrant church is so tucked away that only a part of its roof is actually visible.
If it is possible to call attention to the imperceptibility of something, Vermeer has done so in his depiction of the hidden church, which is so hidden that no one would notice it if they did not already know it was there. There was a point to this. Those who had founded the Remonstrant Church as a separate Protestant denomination, in the early 1620s, had made it clear that, since humility was one of their core values, it should also be expressed in their church buildings. As Simon Episcopius put it in “The Remonstrant Confession,” “far be it that the character of a true church would be localized in things which the world is accustomed to value…namely, antiquity, majority, external splendor of congregations.” An old and splendid building to which well-dressed multitudes flock was the Remonstrants’ epitome of the Church Magnificent, therefore the Church Corrupt. The corollary of that was the conviction that a true Christian’s place of worship should seem as poor as Christ and the apostles themselves. That is how Vermeer chose to present the Remonstrants’ own church in his own native town.
Even though to him and his patrons this was an important place, he depicted it emphatically and with a form of contrary pride as nothing much: just a building converted from a brewer’s outhouse, lacking in visual distinction. Anyone knowing Delft would also know that less than a minute’s walk away stood the great tower of the Oude Kerk, most recognizable of the city’s landmarks and one of the two strongholds of the Reformed Church. It is still there today. Stand where Vermeer might have stood to paint the so-called “Little Street,” look left and there it is, looming over you. The contrast between one church and the other could hardly be more extreme.
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n some respects it suited the Remonstrants to be a semi-suppressed sect whose churches were required by law to be concealed. In Remonstrant belief a church building ought to be self-effacing, because if it were anything else it would be a fraud: the real Church is not made of stone but of people who truly believe. To the Remonstrants, the measure of a church was its effect on the souls of the people worshipping there and living in its parish. This is the true theme of Vermeer’s beautifully optimistic picture. The hidden Remonstrant church and the house that guards it are simply there: quiet, closed, almost unnoticeable. It is the spiritual energy emanating from the church that Vermeer wants us to perceive. That energy animates every corner of his picture, even the sky.
There are clouds above the roof of the hidden church, through which the sun is about to break. Stirrings in the heavens above are confirmed by many signs in the street below that this is a place blessed in the sight of God. The people in the grand house next door to the church are bathed in the light of that benediction. Theirs is a mundane utopia, but a utopia nonetheless. The women are just looking after the children and taking care of the home, sweeping and mending. The children are just together, engrossed in their game. But in a world frequently shattered by war ordinary moments like this are to be treasured. The implication of the picture is that the people in the grand house, quietly caring for one another, have absorbed the spirit of the unobtrusive little church next door. They are doing ordinary things but each one of them has been placed in a posture that a person might adopt while at their devotions. The stooping woman in the alley might be bowing her head in reverence. The woman bent over her sewing might be peering at a Bible. The children playing beneath a bench might be kneeling in prayer.
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he hope enshrined in the picture is that this process of transmission will continue, and that the spirit of peace will move from house to house until all of Delft has been transfigured, then all the world. Delft’s first Remonstrant pastor, Johannes Taurinus, had compared the building of a church to the construction of a house “founded on inward truth rather than false ceremonies.” Such a house might be multiplied many times, until the heavenly city be built here on earth.
The brickwork painted by Vermeer with such close attention to detail supports such thoughts. The painter dwells on the area that connects one property to another, the juncture of the square- and round-topped archways, showing evidence of past mends preserved like scars in the irregularities of its construction. The lines of the mortar on the façades of the houses, with the wavy lines of the cobbled street below, form a skein or web thrown across the whole painting, making a pattern that speaks of the collective enterprise involved in the creation of a street, a town, a community. We build each other’s houses. We edify one another. Paul’s words to the Corinthians were often read out loud at the meetings of the Collegiants: “What then brethren? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification.”
“The neighborliness of Pieter and Maria is gently indicated by the inclusion of their house and the stress placed on its protective relationship to the church behind.”
Vermeer may have painted or at least planned his picture from a room on the ground floor of a house on the opposite side of the Oude Delft canal, perhaps one owned by another Remonstrant who made it available to him. If so then even the point of view of the picture, its perspective, communicates fellow feeling. The neighborliness of Pieter and Maria is gently indicated by the inclusion of their house and the stress placed on its protective relationship to the church behind. We have good reason to believe that their home was also a place of worship, where the message of the New Testament was shared by friends in the Collegiant fellowship and thereby spread to a wider world. This is implied by the vine that climbs vigorously up the façade of the building, proclaiming it to be a house of the Lord, inhabited by the faithful. “I am the true vine,” Christ had told his followers. Vermeer has placed his signature at the spot where a person would stand to water that vine.
It might seem odd that the artist should have cropped his patrons’ house so severely. Why did he not make it more of a focal point? The answer is that he may have done so, but in another picture which has gone missing. The lost pair to “The Little Street” was the receding lot in the Amsterdam auction of 1696, namely Lot 32, described as “A view of a house standing in Delft.” Might the single house depicted in that picture have been 106 Oude Delft, The Golden Eagle, the house of Pieter and Maria, with the vine growing on it, shown on its own and in more detail?
The second, missing picture would probably have been hung directly to the left of the picture that does survive, and composed to the same scale as a continuation of its view of the Oude Delft. If so the two paintings would have affirmed the double sympathy felt by Pieter and Maria for the Remonstrant Church and the Collegiant movement. In their world of belief, as in their daily reality, the hidden church and the invisible Church were side by side.
Excerpt from the new book “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found” (Allen Lane) by Andrew Graham-Dixon.
