A View of Houses in Delft

A second Delft cityscape by Vermeer, now lost, known only from the catalogue of the 1696 sale that dispersed the Dissius collection in Amsterdam. That catalogue lists two townscapes close together, and only one of them can be the surviving Little Street, leaving the other a work that has not been seen since.

Two lots in the Dissius sale

The two entries are lot 32, “a view of a house standing in Delft,” which fetched 72 guilders and 10 stuivers, and lot 33, “a view of some houses,” which fetched 48 guilders. Scholars generally read lot 32 as the Little Street, now in the Rijksmuseum, though the descriptions are vague enough that the identification could fall the other way. Whichever lot corresponds to the surviving picture, the second cityscape no longer exists.

One of the missing Vermeers

It is counted among a small group of paintings that the Dissius catalogue records but that can no longer be traced, alongside other works described too vaguely to attach to anything that survives. On the usual dating it would belong to the same brief period as the Little Street and the View of Delft, the years around 1657 to 1661 in which Vermeer turned from interiors to the streets and skyline of his city.