The Little Street, c.1657/58 Johannes Vermeer, van Delft (1632-1675)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Johannes Vermeer, van Delft also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Little Street is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Sun-lit mortar catches the eye where two green shutters hang, chipped and uneven, against a tide of rust-red brick. From the passageway below, a woman in a cobalt apron bends over a bucket; her rhythm feels almost audible, like the soft scrape of metal on stone. Behind her, a second figure, half-hidden in the arched doorway, pauses from lacework—an ordinary duet staged with astonishing poise.

Across the façade, straight horizontals clash gently with the stepped gable’s vertical thrust, energising the quiet geometry. Cerulean sky presses down on Delft’s compact rooftops, yet a single slash of vermilion on the lower right shutter resists that weight, insisting on its own minor key. Such restricted chromatics—ultramarine, lead-tin yellow, madder lake—prove how Johannes Vermeer, with the most frugal means, conjures a world of tactile density. Impasto thickens the brickwork: paint lies proud, like sand caught in fresh mortar, and one can almost feel the grit under a fingertip.

Silently, cobbles recede in a pale diagonal, guiding the glance—and perhaps the body—into the scene. But Vermeer withholds a grand vista; the street compresses instead of opening, forcing attention back to small domestic rites. In doing so, he sidesteps the theatrics favoured by many peers of the Dutch Golden Age and relocates grandeur to the everyday. Compare the intimate tempo here to View of Delft: the same painter shifts scale, yet his preoccupation with how light settles on masonry remains constant.

Paint history circles around location debates, and recent archival work suggests Vlamingstraat numbers 40–42, a house once owned by the artist’s aunt who sold tripe. That mundane commerce leaves its own trace: a thin ochre gutter line trickles from the left doorway toward the unseen canal, a compositional quirk so specific it anchors the fiction in lived experience. One might imagine the faint briny smell of offal mingling with damp brick and the distant creak of barges, sensory notes that hover long after the canvas is left behind.

Adroit glazing, especially in the grey-blue cloud masses, tempers atmospheric depth; shadows dissolve rather than harden, lending the sky an almost musical softness. Vermeer’s commitment to calibrated quiet invites no sentimentality, yet curiosity pulses underneath: Why is the seated lacemaker turned inward, her story withheld? That unanswered question gives the canvas its slow-burn modernity.

Today, as urban dwellers negotiate intimacy and anonymity in equal measure, this Delft street scene feels uncannily contemporary. Perhaps the painting suggests that the smallest civic spaces—doorstep, window ledge, sluice—shape community more decisively than any monument. Stand before it in the Rijksmuseum and time compresses; the sound of present-day bicycles merges with imagined wooden clogs on brick, and history becomes, not remote, but vividly negotiable.