View of Delft is an oil painting by Johannes Vermeer. Painted ca. 1660-1661, the painting of the Dutch artist's hometown is among his most popular. Painted at a time when cityscapes were not commonplace, it is one of three known paintings of Delft by Vermeer, along with The Little Street and the lost painting House Standing in Delft. The use of pointillism in the work suggests it postdates The Little Street.

We see a glorious partly cloudy sky during early morning. It has just cleared up after a sudden bout of rainfall. Under this expanse of clouds and blue sky the crisp outline of the town of Delft is visible. We are looking at the painting 'View of Delft', an astonishing and moving achievement by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

In this famous painting we see a shaft of sunlight which strikes the roofs of the houses along the Lange Geer canal and the tower of the New Church (nrs 9 and 10 - see numbers on the line drawing). There is an attractive contrast between these highlighted parts of the houses and the tower and their shadowy surroundings, creating a sense of depth. Seeing this painting's vibrant luminosity has remained a fascinating experience for many generations of viewers from the 17th Century to the present. Vermeer's 'View of Delft' was the highlight of the 1995-1996 Vermeer exhibition which was first shown in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and later on in the Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague.

The View of Delft is one of the larger paintings (98.5 cm × 117.5 cm, i.e. 38.8 in × 46.3 in) by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer and one of two surviving paintings showing an exterior view or cityscape (the other being The Little Street). The painting with the Dutch title Geziht op Delft is estimated back to 1660 or 1661. The painting View of Delft shows not surprisingly a view of the city of Delft from the first floor of a house vis-à-vis the river Schie which lies in the foreground of the painting. About three quarters of the margin show the riverbank. Yet, the cityscape is neither a realistic one (the geometry of the houses is rather aligned to the margin of the painting, certain details have been left out, others are stylized) nor does it try to catch up typical elements of cityscapes, such as streets leading in the heart of the city and granting an insight into the life of its citizens. Vermeer’s view of Delft is rather a lifeless one, despite two small groups of people at the river bank.

As in his paintings with interior views Vermeer makes use of falling light to guide the eyes of the viewer. In the View of Delft the left part of the painting and the foreground are held in darker colors and lying in the shadows of big rain clouds. The background and especially the right part are hold in the light colors of sunny weather, where the falling light guides the viewer in particular to a yellow tower. Probably a statement by Vermeer referring to the cathedral as tomb of William I, called the Silent. The Prince of Orange was considered a hero due to his resistance against the Spanish.

There are works in which a single detail steals the show. Leonardo's Mona Lisa is famous for that smile. Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam is famous for those hands. And Vermeer's View of Delft – well, not quite so famous. But among readers of Proust, at least, the painting can't be recalled without a mention of one particular bit. It's a picture you might not expect to break down into bits. It seems so seamlessly photographic. But on a closer look, Vermeer's paint surface separates out into a pattern of light-readings, into dots and dabs and patches of colour. It's one of those.

In volume five of A la recherche du temps perdu, the novelist Bergotte dies. He dies in a gallery, at an exhibition of Dutch paintings, in front of Vermeer's View of Delft. He fixes his last living look on that picture, homing in on a detail of it, which had been pointed out by a critic in a newspaper: "At last he came to the Vermeer, which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. 'That's how I ought to have written,' he said. 'My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall...' He repeated to himself: 'Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall...'" e petit pan de mur jaune... Which patch is it, though?

Some of his pictures feature a large oak table which belonged to his mother-in-law. He would move it upstairs when he wanted to include it in a painting. Vermeer spent his whole life in the city of Delft. He painted a few landscapes. One of the most famous is "View of Delft", his hometown.