This guide covers the eight kinds of places painters have returned to most: Rome, Paris, London, Venice, harbours, deserts, churches and the cityscape itself. Each entry says what the place gave painters, names one painting to look at, and points to the page that goes through that subject in full.
A painted place is rarely a record of a street. Painters chose a city for the problem it set, light on water in Venice, a crowd at a wet intersection in Paris, and then built the picture around that problem.
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The painting people name first when they talk about a painted city is Vermeer's View of Delft, made around 1660 to 1661. Marcel Proust first saw it at the Mauritshuis in October 1902 and later called it the most beautiful painting in the world. Vermeer painted his town a second time, around 1658, in The Little Street, and that picture shows no skyline at all, only the facades of the houses at Vlamingstraat 40 to 42, a woman bent over a washtub and two children on the pavement.
Even the best known place pictures were seldom made on the spot. Monet's Rouen cathedrals are dated 1894, yet he began them in the springs of 1892 and 1893, from rooms facing the cathedral, and finished them in his studio at Giverny. In London he spent three winters, from 1899 to 1901, in a room at the Savoy Hotel, went home with about 100 canvases and worked on them for three more years.
What hangs in a museum under the name of a place is therefore often a memory of it, reworked at leisure. The eight entries below follow what painters wanted from a place, and the paintings show where each one found it.
What You'll Discover
What Panini hung on his own walls.
Why a Paris street has no hero.
Where Monet finished his London.
Who ordered all those Venices.
Why the Rouen cathedrals say 1894.