THE LITTLE PATCH OF YELLOW WALL.

THE LITTLE PATCH OF YELLOW WALL. After many years, my old computer died, and I have been trying out my new Mac with a 27 inch screen. One image I looked at was Vermeer’s View of Delft (a favorite painting, even though I have only seen reproductions of it). I came across this article on the essentialvermeer blog about the importance of the View of Delft for Proust. One of Proust’s characters, the writer Bergotte, goes to an exhibit of Vermeer’s paintings—even though he is very sick—because a critic has praised “a little patch of yellow wall” in the View of Delft, and even though it is “a picture that he adored and imagined that he knew by heart”, Bergotte cannot remember the little patch of yellow wall. Bergotte goes to the exhibit, and “thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time…the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall.”