In one tax record from 1667, he came across the description of a house on what is now Vlamingstraat in Delft – a house where numbers 40 and 42 now stand.
“It is important because Vermeer has remained a kind of mystery, and we haven’t really got to grips with his oeuvre,” said Prof Gijzenhout.
“This is the first time we can really connect a work of art that is definitely by his hand to personal history and his biography. It gives a better insight into his brilliant technical ability as a painter, and his concept of what was worthwhile painting.”
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Prof Grijzenhout presented his findings last week in a book “Vermeer’s Little Street: A View of the Penspoort in Delft”, and at the opening of a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum. The museum has been seeking the location of the painting ever since acquiring it in 1921.
Previous scholars have analysed the width of the buildings, the typical brick size at the time, worked out three-dimensional views of the gardens that would have been behind the houses, and proposed that the point of view meant that the painter must have been a distance away.
Due to the city’s narrow streets, he seems to have been on the other side of a canal.
Then two years ago, Prof Grijzenhout began comparing these theories to an ancient Delft city ledger of canal taxes, and he says that this street address is the only one that matches.
Although the old double gate and an alleyway have disappeared, and the house on the right was replaced by another building in the 19th century, he says the volumes of the homes are the same, and the gate on the right helps mark the spot.
“The document also shows that Vermeer’s aunt (Ariaentgen Claes van der Minne) owned the house on the right,” he said. “Since she worked selling tripe in the meat market in the centre of town, this gate was known as the ‘tripe gate’ and she probably kept and prepared the intestines there.”
Another key fact is that Vermeer’s older sister Geertruyt lived across the street in this rather poorer part of town, and their mother lived there too during the last months of her life.
So Prof Grijzenhout believes Vermeer was recording a way of life that he had left behind by marrying a rich woman.
Peter Roelofs, the Rijksmuseum’s curator of 17th century paintings, said: “The answer to the question of where Het Straatje is located is of great significance and will have profound consequences for the way we look at this painting, and for our image of Vermeer as an artist.”
However, the finding is not without critics, among them Prof Philip Steadman, emeritus professor at University College London, who in 2001 came up with the theory that Vermeer used the camera obscura technique for his painting – an idea that Prof Grijzenhout disputes.
Prof Steadman has published an article suggesting that Het Straatje was painted from an inn on the Market Square in Delft.
“From what has been published in the press so far, this ‘new discovery’ seems very unconvincing to me,” he said.
“Grijzenhout seems to have found a place where there were two houses with two gateways between them, as in The Little Street, but that is hardly conclusive, if that is all the evidence he has.
“There have been many other suggestions for locations for the picture over the years, none of them based on very strong evidence, with one exception – buildings behind Mechelen, the inn where Vermeer lived with his father before he married, first suggested by the art historian Swillens in 1950.”