Vermeer's Shade

I was stunned the first time I saw View of Delft, on my postgraduate Grand Tour, in 1961. 

I turned a corner in the Mauritshuis and there it was. I had never seen a painting that projected such an aura.


View has remained a touchstone for me of how powerful a painting can be, but what struck me this time about View of Delft was its shade.


Not the shadows, but the dark swatch of the town, which is not being raked by the early morning light, but momentarily  shaded by a big (blackened, since the light is behind it) cloud.


(A detail you can't easily see in reproduction, but can if you use the "hotspot" here, by placing your cursor over the  tower on the left—the Schiedam Gate: a clock indicates that the time is 7:20 or so; the position of the big hand is ambiguous.)

Everyone talks about Vermeer's use of light, but I have yet to come across a discussion of Vermeer's shade. 

Or the vast size of the sky. Or those blackened clouds. 

There is a hot spot for the clouds, which cites a Jacob van Ruisdael, painted some ten years later, as typical of "imaginative" Dutch painters spectacular sky effects.


I was disappointed in the Mauritshuis version of van Ruisdael's View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds; he did 15, the most impressive, apparently, being the one in Zurich.