Vermeer to eternity

Before Tracy Chevalier wrote the novel Girl With A Pearl Earring, inspired by Johannes Vermeer's painting - and long before the eponymous movie cemented Scarlett Johansson's meteoric rise to fame - Vermeer's most famous work was View Of Delft. It is a landscape of the town he lived in all his life, painted in 1660-61, when the painter was in his late 20s.

As he sat opposite the city's De Kolk docks to compose what would become one of the world's favourite landscapes, Vermeer's - and the city's - fortunes were riding high. The air would have been filled with the smell of hops, thanks to 200 breweries on site; Delft's porcelain factories were producing their sought-after blue-and-white 'delph', fashioned after Chinese imports; and the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company lent an exotic spice to Delft's 25,000 inhabitants. Vermeer, an art dealer like his father as well as a painter, lived in a grand house off Great Market Square and was about to start an unprecedented two-year-term as headman of The Guild of St Luke, the local artists' guild. It was a golden age.

Things were to change. It is thought that Vermeer did not sell any of his own paintings during his lifetime, but may have bartered some for food and art supplies. So meticulous was the Dutch master it is believed he produced no more than 45 works, of which only 34 survive. By the time he died of a heart attack at 43, he'd seen his family's fortunes fail dismally and left his wife, Catharina, destitute with 11 young children to support (three had died in infancy) and insurmountable debts. Delft, like the rest of the Dutch Republic, was to suffer in the wake of the French invasion of 1672 and it declined into a sleepy market town.

But talent will out. To survive, a desperate Catharina and her mother, Maria Thins, sold the 19 paintings Vermeer had bequeathed them (some to the man who may have been his benefactor, Master van Ruijven). Today his exquisitely rendered interiors can be seen in the world's best galleries and, rarely, in travelling exhibitions (so far only in New York's Metropolitan Museum, London's National Gallery and Madrid's Prado). The unforgettable Girl With A Pearl Earring hangs with View Of Delft in the privately owned Mauritshuis Museum in neighbouring Dutch city The Hague.

Chevalier's fictional story of a serving girl called Griet who dons her mistress' pearl earrings to pose for the artist has made Vermeer a household name; and the movie of the same name, filmed in Delft, has given the city another shot in the arm. Unlike many of the Netherlands' important cities, Delft, now home to the country's leading science and technology university, was not targeted by bombers during the second world war and survives largely intact. While Delft has changed since Vermeer's day, its venerable churches and large marketplace still preside over a bustling town the Dutch fondly call 'mini Amsterdam', complete with a canal dating back to the beginning of the 11th century (the Oude Delft gave the city its name: delven means to dig).

It is also surprisingly easy to reach. Take the schneltren train, which departs six times an hour from Amsterdam's Schipol Airport, and 36 minutes later you can stop at The Hague to see Girl With A Pearl Earring; 10 minutes after leaving The Hague the train pulls into Delft. The ticket costs 7.50 euros (HK$73 - the same price as admission to the Mauritshuis Museum), or hang the cost and go first class for 12 euros.