View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer

View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer, oil on canvas 1659, is a landscape painting of a panoramic view of the river and buildings of the painter’s home city under a sweeping cloudy sky. View of Delft is one of Vermeer’s largest and most ambitious compositions that translates his concerns of light and colour onto the external landscape. The city, shadowed by passing clouds, is reflected in the rippling water, as the small foreground figures set the epic scale of the painting. Johannes (Jan) Vermeer (1632 - 1675) was a Dutch master painter of interior genre scenes whose works were rediscovered in the 19th century. In carefully constructed, geometric compositions drawn in meticulous linear perspective, Vermeer explored the effects of light and colour across human figures, objects and textures in sunlit, domestic rooms, building upon the optical discoveries and 3D perspectival depth of Leonardo and the Renaissance. Both a painter and an art dealer, Vermeer slowly produced a few of his painstakingly executed, richly pigmented compositions per year, living entirely within his home city of Delft, eschewing the fame of his near contemporaries Rubens and Rembrandt that he achieved finally in the modern era.