Your brochures tell you that you can take a canal boat trip which will include the spot from which Jan Vermeer painted his "View of Delft". Delft had walls, 8 gates and 24-26 turrets for its defence system. You can walk easily to the East Gate, the only surviving gate, dating from the fourteenth/fifteenth century.

Tiles were only one strand in the total artistic, business and social world of Delft. I want to sketch in the period during which the tile industry developed, and I want to do it by discussing some of the city's notable citizens.

Four people whose lives are part of Delft's history and who contributed to its growth and importance are Hugo Grotius, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Pieter de Hooch and perhaps the most famous, Johannes (Jan) Vermeer. There is a fifth, not so famous, but who is entitled to recognition nonetheless, and that is Geertruyt (Gertrude) van Oosten, fourteenth century Beguine and mystic. I touch briefly on their participation in the fields respectively of politics and law, science, art and religion.

Now grown to a city of approximately 90,000 people, Delft had already existed as a hamlet by the year 989. Some steps along the way to what we know as modern Delft are: in 1246 part of Delft, Nieuwe Delft, (New Delft) obtained its town Charter from William II, Count of Holland; in 1268 the remainder, Oude Delft (Old Delft) also gained its Charter; the Markt was added as town property in the fifteenth century. In the seventeenth century Delft was prosperous and industries such as textiles, beer and pottery were flourishing. As the textile and beer industries died out, the pottery industry grew in importance. Some potteries even benefited by moving into the abandoned brewery buildings. In the early seventeenth century, blue and white porcelain was imported from China by Dutch and Portuguese merchant ships. After the formation of the Dutch East India Company, trade with the Far East grew rapidly. The popularity of the fine blue and white Chinese porcelain led Dutch potters to attempt to emulate it. When importation of porcelain from China lessened due to internal Chinese upheavals, the Delft potters were particularly successful in developing their own 'delftware'- a very superior form of tin-glazed and hand-painted pottery. "The rest is history", to use an irrestistible cliché.

Although Delft tiles formed only part of the delftware output, many tiles were exported to the rest of Europe, especially for royalty and the very rich. Two foreign locations for Delft tiles are in the kitchen at the Amalienburg Hunting Lodge, at Schloss Nymphenburg, in Munich and in the Menshikov Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.