Yay!
I saw this in the theater with my husband when it came out. My husband went with me to humor me, and ended up fascinated. According to Penn (on his podcast), they have 2400 hours of footage of Tim painting the painting. Every brushstroke was captured. But I would say he proved his theory.
Good lord.
As Tim says, all he proved is that his method produces similar results to what we see in an actual Vermeer. Minus a time machine, a document explicitly stating what Vermeer’s method was, or other smoking gun evidence, all we can do is make educated guesses.
I find it unlikely that an artist wouldn’t use lines, unless he was producing art in a manner like this. The mathematical evidence that the aspect ratio is consistent for a single, fixed point lens, also seems pretty damning. But Tim’s observations about slightly curved lines or halation both seemed like things that could simply be imperfections due to human - not systematic - error.
His bit about absolute color comparison also seemed pretty shady. I might not be able to compare two unrelated colors on different sides of the room, but I can still tell that there’s a gradient change from light to dark over the span of a wall. I can perform a rough-estimate of the degree of change or even hold up color swatches to get it perfect. Perhaps there was more to his explanation than that, but the documentary failed to go into it fully. But simply stating that the wall has a nice color gradient too it, isn’t terribly convincing.
So overall, the stuff that Tim brought (except the gradient thing) are all interesting, but they weren’t super-convincing. You’d need to find curved lines and halation across all of Vermeer’s works, not just in single works.
So Vermeer used this strange, complicated technique to paint at least three dozen paintings, nearly all of which have multiple subjects in them… and not one person ever commented on it? Not one subject wrote something in a letter to her parents? Not one observer told stories that got recorded somewhere? Not one critic or supplier or friend or colleague as much as said, “Ach, that Jan and his crazy lens machine!”
Right. Hans van Meegeren also did perfect Vermeers without any such technique.
Interesting technical exercise and it might say something about a unique technical process Vermeer used to visualize his paintings, but a bit too Chariots of the Gods for me.
Just to add that this topic has been treated exhaustively from various angles since, oh, 1970? or so, so Hockney was a very very very late comer to the conversation. (I can provide a little bibliography of art historical articles on Vermeer (and van Hoogstraten and Fabritius, et al) if anyone desires). We DO know that Canaletto, for example, had a box camera obscura, and Josh Reynolds’ is in a museum somewhere I think-- how these things were used/useful is a different discussion. Possible that they’re too finicky to actually trace from (and artists are trained to draw, so this would have been a hindrance) but could give a good sense of optical effects. But there’s a lot of literature on the topic out there predating the current round of discussion.
If it was a trade secret, it’s reasonable to believe that Vermeer may have had some way of obfuscating everything (e.g. sitting in a large box, such that no one could see him actually paint). It’s also reasonable to believe that his wife may have destroyed or repurposed the equipment, so as not to diminish the value of his works.
It also looks like nearly all the information we have about him is, basically, just from city records and the like: Johannes Vermeer - Wikipedia If we have no letters from someone talking about their experience getting painted, period, then it’s pretty reasonable to not have any commentary about the setup in the room.
I accept that JV is a pretty mysterious figure, all but forgotten until he and his works were rediscovered what, 200 years later?
However… if I were to snap a picture of you at a block party, it’s unlikely you’d ever comment to anyone or even much notice. If I were to roll up a huge, strange looking box that crackled with St Elmo’s fire and whined, then show you the photo I took, you’d sure as hell remember and might make a comment somewhere to someone about it.
Any of the proposed techniques are odd enough that someone should have made note of them, even in the kind of passing comments we have from classical historians.
All of his paintings were done in the same room, so there was no “rolling up” a box. Nor does any lense that I know of crackle with St Elmo’s fire.
I might find it odd that the artist chooses to go into a side room and paint, looking at me through a small hole, but I wouldn’t think it any more strange and diabolical than the contraptions that he uses to keep me standing still for hours on end. How often have you written letters talking about light meters and weird reflective umbrellas, from getting your picture taken?
Someone on another forum pointed out that Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a contemporary of Vermeer, and was even the executor of Vermeers will.
So it’s not as if he didn’t have a potential resource for state-of-the-art optics and possibly even someone to be relied upon to keep a secret.
Do we have ANY model’s recollection of being painted, by any pre-1900 artist, ever?
Would be interesting to hear the model’s perspective.
Stepping back, I shoulda known that a thread like this would involve discussing the actual topic of the documentary. I just thought it was a cool doc 
but appreciate the fact that the topic itself - Did Vermeer and other painters use optics? - has adherents on both sides.
capybara - it sounds like you know this stuff. Can you provide an overview of how this topic has been approached in the art world prior to Hockney? Are there respected voices on both sides, or was one side overwhelmingly favored?
I guess I would say: hey, Jenison actually did a painting. Kinda like Kon Tiki or something ;). Actually trying it makes for interesting insights and further discussion. Doesn’t resolve the issue, as others have stated, but provides very practical experience…
Is this on Netflix streaming or disc? I couldn’t find it on streaming.
I got the disc.
For comparison, here’s Tim’s:
Vermeer’s:
Vermeer’s colors seem to be brighter, overall, I notice.
That could be an indication that Vermeer didn’t use this process, since it seems unlikely that the gold front of the virginal could have been that much brighter in Vermeer’s studio. (Other things could be differences in materials - like a lighter blue fabric on the chair or a more shiny red skirt - but gold is gold.)
Or it could be that Tim missed a step. He set up the whole room and, other than moving people in and out, basically left it as a static piece. Vermeer could reasonably have moved mirrors to light every object in the room differently, before painting it.
Personally, I’d probably bet that Vermeer used some technology to allow himself to blob out the objects that he was painting, to get the perspective and relative positions right, but then filled in everything by eye. Or, he used his technology to keep track of locations, but didn’t try to match up colors.