Tim’s Vermeer
Film Review by Jean Oppenheimer
The 17th Century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer is one of those artists — Caravaggio is another –- who are routinely cited by directors and cinematographers as visual references for the look of their films. In the case of Vermeer, it was his uncanny ability to paint light that has proven so awe-inspiring and influential. His skill at capturing the color and light variations of sunlight streaming through a window was so remarkable it gave his compositions a photo-realistic quality. How did he achieve such verisimilitude — 150 years before the invention of photography?
For more than a century art historians have speculated that Vermeer used some type of optical device to assist him in rendering sunlight with such precision and specificity (Like many Dutch artists of the period, Vermeer specialized in domestic scenes, many of them set inside his studio in Delft, with windows supplying most of the illumination). In his 2001 book Vermeer’s Camera, British Architecture Professor Philip Steadman posited that the painter had used a camera obscura to reveal variations that aren’t visible to the naked eye. It is a theory also endorsed by artist David Hockney, who believed that many great painters, from the 15th Century on, might have used “lens-and-mirror contraptions to achieve their photo-realistic effects.”
But the theory seemed incomplete. Enter Tim Jenison, an amiable, rumpled, Texas-based inventor who knew nothing of the controversy swirling around the art world but who had himself became obsessed with the question of how Vermeer painted such photo-realistic compositions. The artist had left no diary or notes to explain his methods. Jenison concocted an experiment. He knew he could never prove what Vermeer had done, but he could at least suggest a plausible theory.
Jenison’s theory revolves around the idea that Vermeer used not only a camera obscura but also two small mirrors (for a detailed explanation you must see the film). The inventor researched the painter for several years, then spent eight months building a life-size replica of the setting depicted in Vermeer’s painting The Music Lesson. He constructed the entire room from scratch: building furniture, windows, and other objects seen in the picture; hand-crafting lenses that would have been available in the late-1600s; and grinding and mixing the paint and pigments by hand. He then spent 130 days attempting to paint his reproduction. Directed by Teller (of Penn and Teller), Tim’s Vermeer is the jaw-dropping and wildly entertaining documentary that follows Jenison on his multi-year quest to deconstruct Vermeer’s genius.