In his book ‘Vermeer’s Camera’, British architect Philip Steadman set up to practically prove an idea that had been first proposed in the 19th century, according to which Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer used a camera obscura to construct the compositions of his paintings.
Vermeer painted a significant amount of his work in one room, his studio in Delft. Reverse-engineering the perspective, Steadman went from the two-dimensional image of the painting to the three-dimensional scene, which he represented in floorplan, elevation and axonometric. This method allowed him to find the exact point of view for each of them. When he elongated the lines of the viewpoint back to the wall, he found that in most cases the rectangle defined in the wall was also the exact size of Vermeer’s painting, which would be too much of a coincidence.
After reading both this book and David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, engineer and inventor Tim Jenison was fascinated not only by the probable use of a camera obscura to construct perfect perspectives, but also for Vermeer’s masterful portrayal of light, which he felt was too perfect and photographic to have been achieved only via observation through the human eye.
He used his own knowledge on optics to build a relatively simple artifact of lenses and mirrors that he argues could be similar to the one he imagines Vermeer used. He rebuilt Vermeer’s room in a storage facility in Texas and proceeded to paint “The Music Lesson” using this artifact and no prior knowledge of brush work. The whole process, including interviews with both Hockney and Steadman was filmed for the documentary ‘Tim’s Vermeer’, a portrayal of the discovery of a process that may or may not be accurate, but is nonetheless fascinating.
In his book ‘Vermeer’s Camera’, British architect Philip Steadman set up to practically prove an idea that had been first proposed in the 19th century, according to which Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer used a camera obscura to construct the compositions of his paintings.
Vermeer painted a significant amount of his work in one room, his studio in Delft. Reverse-engineering the perspective, Steadman went from the two-dimensional image of the painting to the three-dimensional scene, which he represented in floorplan, elevation and axonometric. This method allowed him to find the exact point of view for each of them. When he elongated the lines of the viewpoint back to the wall, he found that in most cases the rectangle defined in the wall was also the exact size of Vermeer’s painting, which would be too much of a coincidence.
After reading both this book and David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, engineer and inventor Tim Jenison was fascinated not only by the probable use of a camera obscura to construct perfect perspectives, but also for Vermeer’s masterful portrayal of light, which he felt was too perfect and photographic to have been achieved only via observation through the human eye.
He used his own knowledge on optics to build a relatively simple artifact of lenses and mirrors that he argues could be similar to the one he imagines Vermeer used. He rebuilt Vermeer’s room in a storage facility in Texas and proceeded to paint “The Music Lesson” using this artifact and no prior knowledge of brush work. The whole process, including interviews with both Hockney and Steadman was filmed for the documentary ‘Tim’s Vermeer’, a portrayal of the discovery of a process that may or may not be accurate, but is nonetheless fascinating.
