View of Delft
painting by Johannes Vermeer
View of Delft (Dutch: Zicht op Delft) is an oil painting by Johannes Vermeer, painted c. 1659–1661. The painting of the Dutch artist's hometown is among his best known. It is one of three known paintings of Delft by Vermeer, along with The Little Street and the lost painting House Standing in Delft, and his only cityscape. According to art historian Emma Barker, cityscapes across water, which were popular in the Netherlands at the time, celebrated the city and its trade. Vermeer's View of Delft has been held in the Dutch Royal Cabinet of Paintings at the Mauritshuis in The Hague since its establishment in 1822.
The painting was featured in the 1980 BBC Two series 100 Great Paintings.
Description
A technical analysis shows that Vermeer used calcite, lead white, yellow ochre, natural ultramarine, and madder lake pigments.
The landscape was painted from an elevated position to the southeast of Delft, possibly the upper floor of the Mechelen tavern where the artist's studio was located. To the very right of the painting is a medieval brick building called the Rotterdam Gate, in front of which are two herring busses. It is one of two gates on Delft's south side, the other being the Schiedam Gate, shown in the middle of the composition.
“View of Delft” enters the record as painting by Johannes Vermeer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what View, Delft and painting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“View of Delft” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, View, Delft and painting provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q523974. VIAF identifies the subject as 180478765. The Library of Congress control number is no2003025989. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1659, 1661, 1822 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “View of Delft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.