How to Make Your Own Vermeer
If you go to one of the big museums and tour the painting galleries, you notice something that happens around 400 years ago. Painters, especially Dutch painters, achieved an unprecedented realism. Among them, one stands out: Johannes Vermeer, whose canvases are almost photographic — more than 150 years before the camera was invented.
That’s why some have speculated that in order to achieve those uncannily real images, Vermeer must have invented an optical device that projected the image of what he saw onto a canvas — then copying that image in paint. Aspects of his paintings appear to capture light in ways our eyes do not see. But proponents of that theory didn’t have a model of such an apparatus, until a computer-video entrepreneur named Tim Jenison committed to figuring it out a decade ago.
Using a lens and two mirrors, Jenison built what he believes was the device used by the 17th century artist. The documentary Tim’s Vermeer shows Jenison painstakingly reproducing Vermeer’s painting The Music Lesson. (Teller, the notoriously silent half of the magic act Penn & Teller, directed the film.) Jenison was as authentic as possible; he even ground his own lenses and mixed his own paints so that they would match what Vermeer had available. And even with the apparatus, “the painting process itself was just exasperating,” Jenison tells Kurt Andersen. “Not fun at all, especially painting the Turkish carpet which I had to paint every stitch … It took about 35% of the total painting time to make that stupid carpet and it was painful, it was physically painful.”
The theory that Vermeer used an optical device — popularized by the painter David Hockney and the scholar Philip Steadman — has drawn criticism. Many believe that Vermeer’s genius was how he composed with light, not how he reproduced it. And art historians are firm that there is no documentation of any device. “We’re saying perhaps Vermeer used this,” Teller admits. “There’s no physical hard evidence. But there is a significant amount of evidence in the paintings that say, ‘Oh, wow, it sure could have been done this way.’”
Jenison’s finished faux-Vermeer hangs in his bedroom above the fireplace. “Every morning I can wake up and look at it and try to forget the anguish that went into it and enjoy the good parts.”
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Slideshow: DIY Vermeer
