A View of Delft: Vermeer Then and Now

Johannes Vermeer has always been considered the most elusive of great artists, but this book tracks him down to his home town, taking us back to seventeenth-century Delft in a piece of historical writing that does justice to its now timeless subject. A brilliant blend of scholarly research and more recent findings, A View of Delft sketches a vivid portrait of the Protestant innkeeper’s son who married a prosperous Catholic girl and had 15 children of whom 11 survived. It also introduces us to Vermeer’s colleagues and fellow-citizens, and charts his celebrity out of Holland, including his effect on Proust and Hitler, among others. Vermeer died in obscurity at the age of forty-three, leaving fewer than forty paintings, many now considered masterpieces.