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"Among those who have celebrated View of Delft by Vermeer was, famously, Marcel Proust, who first encountered it in the Mauritshuis in 1902 and knew he 'had seen the most beautiful picture in the world'. He loved the painting and was transfixed by one small segment of it. On the right side of the scene, just to the left of a pair of towers, sunlight floods a fragment of a building: the 'little patch of yellow wall' known even to those Proust addicts who don't know the painting. Proust's passion for the picture was bestowed on a character in Rememberence of Things Past, the novelist Bergotte, who, while admiring it in a Paris museum exhibit, is struck down by blood poisoning. He dies memorably, muttering, 'little patch of yellow wall...little patch of yellow wall.'"
From Helen Dudar, Smithsonian, November 1995.