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Showing posts with the label The Little Street

Blogging Anniversary - 10 years

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A while ago I checked when I did my first blog post, in order to celebrate with an anniversary post. Well, that day came and went without any reaction from me. Better late than never, so here a reminder of my very first blog post from 24 October 2012.  The book was New Finnish Grammar  by Diego Marani. Marani is an Italian novelist, translator and newspaper columnist. While working as a translator for the European Union he invented a language ‘Europanto’ which is a mixture of languages and based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. It was a suitable book to start with, being a book about letters, languages and memories. With a beautiful prose, the novel went directly to my heart.  "One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can ide...
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Nonfiction November - Vermeer's Little Street by Frans Gruzenhout

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  I bought two books when I visited Delft earlier this year. All about Delft and painter Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer mostly painted interiors from his(?) house. Young ladies in different occupations around the house, working, maybe being visited by a suitor, or just having a good time. He painted three outside views of which only two are known to exist today. One is  View of Delft and one is The Little Street.  Both wonderful, as everything that he painted. "After 1696 we lose sight of The Little Street and the View of Delft for a very long time, and we have heard nothing whatsoever about the third town-scape since then. It is possible that it is lurking unrecognized as an anonymous work in a collection somewhere, or has been lost. The Little Street did not surface for more than a century, when it appeared in the estate of Gerrit Willem van Oosten de Bruyn, who died in Haarlem in 1797." Since Vermeer became popular again at the end of the 19th century, art historians inte...
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