Welcome to todays
Lunch Hour Lecture,
my name's Prof. Bob Sheil,
Director of the School of Architecture
I'm really looking forward to
todays talk for all sorts of reasons.
Introductions to these lectures
are always very short,
but particularly in respect to
todays speaker,
I couldn't begin to attempt to
describe his career trajectory
in a short space of time,
so I'm not even going to attempt that.
Prof. Steadman, put it this way,
over the last 25 years or so,
has been the most sought after
PhD supervisor in our faculty.
That might be one way of summarising
his importance to our community
and I'm really proud he's here today
to talk to the university at large.
Please welcome
Prof. Phil Steadman.
Thank you Bob.
Johannes Vermeer,
the great Dutch painter,
was born in 1632 and died in 1675,
and he probably lived all his life
in the town of Delft.
This is his
panoramic view of Delft.
Vermeer's work was very much
admired in his lifetime,
his paintings sold for high prices,
he was head man of the Guild of St Luke
the guild of painters in Delft
at the age of just 29.
But after he died,
he was soon forgotten.
In the 18th century,
his work tended to be attributed
to other more prolific contemporaries,
and he more or less disappeared
as an historical personage.
He was bought back to life,
his reputation was resuscitated
in the 1860s
by a French art historian
called Théophile Thoré
who assembled a catalogue
with photographs
and bought some of the pictures himself
and almost immediately
writers and critics
started to compare Vermeer's work
with the new art of photography,
which had been commercialised
just 20 years before by Daguerre.
I could give you many quotations
but I'll just give you two,
the first people
to make this comparison
were the Goncourt brothers
in their journal in 1861.
They talked about Vermeer as
"the only master
who has made a living daguerreotype of
the red brick houses of his country."
They were talking about this picture
'The Little Street'
as well as about the
'View of Delft'.
100 years later,
Is that better?
got to see Vermeer in the proper light,
yes, okay, thank you.
100 years later, Sir Kenneth Clarke
in his book on landscape
talked about the 'View of Delft'
said this was the closest painting
had come to a coloured photograph.
So, what did these people mean?
What were they talking about when they
compared Vermeer with photographs?
I think first of course,
they would be talking about
the perfect illusion of space
that Vermeer creates
with perspective geometry.
As seen to best effect in this picture
'The Music Lesson',
which belongs to the Queen,
it's at Buckingham Palace.
The illusion Vermeer gives us
of space and depth
created through
perspective geometry.
The word photographic might also imply
minute attention to detail
and we can certainly find that
in Vermeer.
The virginals,
this instrument the woman's playing
has decorative patterns printed
on paper and pasted to the box.
If we look at a small detail,
and enlarge it up
we can see Vermeer renders the pattern,
all the curlicues and flowers,
with minute attention,
they're a small part of the picture,
but elsewhere Vermeer paints
quite freely, quite loosely
one might say out of focus.
This picture, 'The Lace Maker'
at the Louvre,
look at the skeins of thread
that spill from her workbasket.
He painted with dribbles of paint,
almost like a Jackson Pollock.
I think the most important
characteristic of Vermeer's pictures
that leads people to make
comparisons with photography,
is his extreme truth
to tonal values.
His fidelity to the exact patterns of
light and dark in the subject.
Kenneth Clarke might have compared
'View of Delft' to a colour photograph,
but if we remove the colour
it looks perhaps even more like a
black and white photograph.
Vermeer is often referred to as
painting with light,
of course you can't paint with light,
you paint with paint.
What it means I think
is he was a master of tone,
a master of depicting the
fall of light on objects
as reflection and
the way it casts shadows.
It was perhaps all these
comparisons with photography
that began to suggest to people
as early as the end of the 19th century
that Vermeer might have used
an optical tool to help with painting
and specifically they imagined
he used a camera obscura,
the predecessor to
the photographic camera.
The camera obscura is a simple device,
you have a lens, you project an image
of a scene or subject
onto a screen,
perhaps onto a wall,
and then you can study the image
perhaps trace it or work from it.
18th century camera obscuras
were quite small boxes
but in 17th century,
all the descriptions of cameras
were of much larger set-ups,
cubicles or booths or tents.
This, on the left, is the
earliest drawing of a camera obscura
being used to look at a solar eclipse
by the mathematician Gemma Frisius.
Here on the right,
the simplest form of this camera is
a screen on the wall opposite the lens
and the image you get
is upside down
but if you turn it the right way up
it's also mirrored.
So this is what happens
to Vermeer's monogram
as you look at it
in the projected image.
The first suggestion that Vermeer
might have used optical apparatus
was made in 1891 by the
American graphic artist, Joseph Pennell
and in the first half of C20th,
several historians picked up the idea
and they made experiments
with camera obscuras,
and they found features in
Vermeer's paintings
that seemed to reproduce
artefacts of lenses
seemed to reproduce things
you would see in an optical image,
but that you wouldn't see
with the naked eye.
The culmination of
this developing argument
came in a book
published by Lawrence Gowing,
in 1952,
just called Vermeer.
I think that's probably the
best book on Vermeer.
It's the most perceptive.
Gowing was an artist
as well as an art historian,
he was principal of the Slade School
here at UCL between 1975 - 1985.
In his book he points to
some idiosyncratic characteristics
in the way Vermeer paints.
In particular he says that
Vermeer never uses line
to describe the outline of a piece,
as other painters might do.
In fact there are very few lines
in his painting even in the underpaint.
Look at the bridge of the nose,
here in the 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'
you'll see there's no line
describing the bridge of the nose,
but Vermeer has noticed the
tone and hue of the bridge
is exactly the same as the
tone and hue of the cheek beyond.
He just paints across,
and he knows we'll understand
the shape of the nose from
the shadow on the right underneath.
Gowing was absolutely convinced that
Vermeer used a camera obscura
in fact he thought it was the
formative influence on his style.
He says what Vermeer
seems to be doing
is looking at patches of tone and hue
and matching them in paint,
almost forgetting what he's looking at.
"What do men call this wedge of light?
A nose? A finger?
What do we know of its shape?
To Vermeer, none of this matters,
the conceptual world of
names and knowledge is forgotten,
nothing concerns him but what's visible
the tone, the wedge of light."
Up to this point,
the idea Vermeer used a camera
was based on properties of style,
on his painted treatment,
and there was debate among
art historians and Vermeer specialists,
to what was the extent and nature of
Vermeer's use of optical instruments.
Did he look at them?
Was he inspired by them?
Or did he actually work from them
transcribing images?
I became interested in the 1990s
and I took a different approach.
Anybody who looks at Vermeer's
pictures of domestic interiors
like 'The Music Lesson'
of which he painted more than twenty,
must be struck by the impression
that many seem to show the same room.
There are some different rooms but...
Look again at 'The Music Lesson'
we see a blank wall facing us,
the ceiling has these rafters
running across left to right,
black and white tiles on the floor,
and the windows,
these lower lights,
have a complex pattern of leading.
These occur in other paintings
all these features,
so at the top is the ceiling
in 'The Music Lesson',
'The Art of Painting' and
'Allegory of Faith' it also appears,
seems to be the same height of room,
rafters run across
and they're about the same
size and spacing.
Here are the windows.
This is 'The Music Lesson'
and perhaps you can see
this pattern of leading is made of
squares, circles and half-circles.
Very characteristic.
We see it again in 7 other pictures.
Sometimes Vermeer puts in a
stained glass insert
but basically it's the same pattern.
The black and white tiles,
they also re-appear
although sometimes
in different patterns.
I decided to try and determine
what the geometry was of these rooms,
to see if ones that looked the same
are geometrically the same
and it's possible to do this
by reconstructing the 3D geometry,
by working the methods of perspective
backwards so to speak.
I won't go into detail but
in making a perspective picture
you start with a 3D scene and
you convert it into a 2D image.
By going the other direction
from the picture to
the geometry of the scene,
which you can do,
fairly standard procedures,
and these are my drawings
of 'The Music Lesson'.
At the top is the plan view
you can see the floor tiles,
the viola de gamba,
the virginals and the figures.
Here it is in side view.
The diagonal lines are the extent of
what you can see, the angled view.
They meet at the view point,
this is the V on the left,
and this is the point Vermeer would
have put his eye to see the scene
as depicted in 'The Music Lesson'.
If he used a camera, it would be the
point at which he put his lens,
and you can perhaps imagine,
these lines make a kind of
pyramid on its side,
its apex is at the viewpoint.
In general, one can't determine
the absolute size.
One can get relative sizes
but so far as geometry is concerned,
these might as well be dolls
in dolls houses
as real people in real interiors,
except for the fact that
Vermeer shows a lot of real objects
which survive
or examples of which survive.
So if we take 'The Music Lesson'
the virginals are recognisable as
the work of the Antwerp firm Ruckers.
Here's one in a museum.
The stands are different,
but the instrument itself is the same.
It has a pattern, printed papers
with double seahorses.
I don't know if you can make them out
but they're the ones Vermeer shows.
This is Vermeer's rendering
of the pattern on the lid,
which I showed you before,
and above is an actual printed paper
of the kind used in C17th.
I think you can see how very accurately
this was reproduced.
Every curlicue.
The chair.
This is the chair,
you can't see here really
it's got little lions heads
in brass on the back.
Here it is another picture
'The Glass of Wine'.
You can see the lions' heads.
There are several of these chairs
in the Rijksmuseum and in Delft,
and you can perhaps see how the
turning of these members
the profiles are in horizontal
so they're exactly the same.
These are real objects.
The viola de gamba is a standard size
to fit between people's legs.
So it's possible to compare
all these rooms that
seem to show the same room.
I used the floor tiles as
a kind of measuring stick
and if you make those smaller or larger
you can make the whole room
bigger and smaller,
you can look at the effects
on the real objects
and see when they come
to their known sizes,
assuming Vermeer reproduced
and depicted their real sizes,
and compare the dimensions of the room.
It turns out that 11 pictures show
what is geometrically the same room.
It's a room Vermeer used as a studio,
I won't go into detail.
The furniture and props are repeated
because he's making tableaus,
rearranging them in the same room
for his various compositions.
In 'The Music Lesson'
on the back wall, there's a mirror
which reflects some of the floor tiles
the woman's head,
the table with its carpet,
if we enlarge it,
there's a group of pieces of furniture
slightly mysterious but
if you look carefully,
you can see that one of them is
an easel with a canvas on it
behind is a stool.
Up in this top left corner,
there's what must be the back wall,
and you can work out
the angle at which the mirror hangs.
That makes it possible to reconstruct
the part of room that is reflected.
The tile pattern matches across,
here's the easel, the stool
the viewpoint is indeed at the
eye point of someone on the stool
and here's the back wall.
The important point is we now have a
measurement for the length of the room.
This happens to be
the same dimension as the room
where Vermeer is known to have painted
in his mother-in-law's house.
We've now reached the
central discovery of my book,
Vermeer's Camera published in 2001,
and it's this.
Here's the plan of the room,
so the blank wall,
which is on the right here,
from the mirror reflection
we've got the back wall on the left,
the window wall
is at the top,
and these diagonal lines
show the angle of view
these pyramids on their side
these are the viewpoints of 6 pictures.
If you carry back these diagonal lines
they describe a width
on the back wall,
we can do the same thing side view.
You can perhaps imagine
by this geometrical process
we can arrive at a rectangle
in each case on the back wall
and in those 6 cases,
and possibly more,
the rectangles are the exact size of
Vermeer's canvas.
I think it's difficult to explain that
strange geometrical coincidence,
nobody has produced explanations
other than Vermeer had a booth camera.
Looking towards the back of the room,
he had a booth there
this is the back wall,
the window wall.
He puts his lens to the
different positions of the viewpoint
he must be able to
move the lens around.
He projects onto the back wall
it's upside down, left to right,
the reason this projected image is the
same size as the canvas
is because Vermeer has traced it
has worked from it.
My demonstration depends on
perspective geometry
but I had another way of
testing the same results.
We made a model of the room
at 1/6ths scale,
with little furniture and dolls,
and instead of Vermeer's camera obscura
we've got a plate camera.
The lens can be put in position at the
viewpoint of Vermeer's pictures.
The plate of the camera
is in line with the back wall.
So we can make photographic simulations
of the pictures
and this is 'The Music Lesson',
there are some differences
One thing we were pleased with
is the way some shadows came out.
The shadows on the virginals legs
and the windows and so on.
There's another example
without the figures in this case,
of 'The Concert'
and this has another painted painting,
The Procuress by van Baburen
which still exists,
and I've used a little photograph
to simulate it there.
So that in brief is the main message
of Vermeer's Camera,
and for me, and some who read the book,
this is a clear cut demonstration
of the fact that Vermeer did
use a camera
and it was a booth camera
that he worked inside,
and that he at least traced large parts
or transcribed large parts
of his painting from optical images.
The fact it's a geometrical argument
not based on documents,
but on objective geometrical properties
of the pictures as they exist today
gives the argument a special force,
but I didn't convince everybody.
In particular, some Vermeer specialists
made counter-arguments.
I just want to say
a couple of words about those,
one of the arguments that was made
was that
Vermeer's pictures are not snapshots
of daily life in the Vermeer house.
These are very careful compositions,
in which the interrelationships
of 2D shapes in the 2D image
is as important as the illusion
of space we get from perspective.
My answer is of course they're not no.
They are indeed
very carefully considered
the critics are imagining
making a picture with a camera obscura
is like taking a snapshot.
it's not.
One can use the camera obscura,
precisely as a composition machine,
what it does
is turns a scene into a picture.
Vermeer could have set out
his furniture and his props
got his models into place and
then looked at the image in the camera
and said to his assistant,
move the picture, get the girl to turn,
until he was satisfied.
So the camera is a composition machine,
in fact Vermeer could have worked like
a C19th studio photographer.
The second criticism is more dismissive
and it says bluntly,
it is a basic mistake to even imagine
what we see in Vermeer are real scenes.
These are imaginative constructions
from Vermeer's creative mind.
This view is one that's been advanced
with some force by Walter Liedtke
who tragically was killed in
a train crash a month ago,
he was the man who knew more
about Vermeer than anyone else.
This was a view he put
on a number of occasions,
but there's a strange paradox here,
because Vermeer scholars have been
happy to recognise these real objects,
that appear in the pictures
and to show where they came from.
I mentioned some examples in
'The Music Lesson' and 'The Concert'.
This is the table in 'The Concert',
it's got a carpet over it,
but you can perhaps just see,
this was a real table,
there were several
in museums in Holland
and they have the same round knee
so to speak,
and this square ankle,
it's the same table basically.
This is 'Allegory of the Faith',
behind the figure personifying faith
is this large crucifixion,
recognisable as an image
by Jacob Jordaens.
Vermeer's copied it fairly accurately,
there are some differences
this was a painting that was
actually in his step-mother's house.
It appears in the
inventory of possessions.
This is maps,
Vermeer had a mania for maps.
There are at least six that appear,
sometimes more than once in his work.
This is the
'Soldier and Laughing Girl',
the painting on the left,
the map on the right,
it's reproduced with
extraordinary precision.
See the little cartouches,
the figures, the ships in the sea,
all the details even down to
these printed paper commentaries
that are printed on paper
and stuck on canvas.
This is 'The Astronomer'.
He's got a book open,
and it has a diagram on it,
which allows you to identify
what page and what edition it is.
This is a celestial globe
showing the constellations
and here is the real globe by Hondius
in the same position as Vermeer had it.
It's surely perverse to argue
that these come from his imagination.
It's a real room,
they're real objects.
Vermeer was a genius,
but he depicted reality.
Soon after Vermeer's Camera,
my book, was published,
an American engineer called Tim Jenison
was given a copy by his daughter.
Tim Jenison is a computer specialist
he developed the first computer systems
for video editing,
and built a company called NewTek,
which does special effects for movies,
so he's a man who knows about optics
and realistic images.
I left two questions open
at the end of my book,
one was that in the simple kind of
booth camera that I've described
the image is upside down
but it's mirrored
and it's clear from the pictures,
the paintings are not mirror images,
the globe is the correct way round.
How did Vermeer reverse the image?
Unmirror it so to speak.
That's not so difficult.
The second question is trickier.
If you're inside a booth,
you're in the semi-darkness.
How could you see to paint in colour?
How could you see what's
on your palette and your canvas?
I left those questions open,
I had some ideas,
Jenison thought hard
about the questions
he was having a bath one evening
in his hotel in Amsterdam,
and he had a revelation,
a sort of Archimedes moment,
and he conceived of a
very simple optical device,
which he thought would solve
both these problems at once,
and he tried the method to reproduce
photographs and it seemed to work.
He made other experiments
and convinced himself
that in order to prove his argument,
he would try to paint a Vermeer
even though he'd never picked up
a paintbrush in his life.
He hired a warehouse in Texas,
and he built Vermeer's studio
and furnished it as for
'The Music Lesson',
and he built a big cubicle
camera obscura at the back.
Jenison is a friend of Penn Jillette,
who is one half of the magician act,
Penn and Teller.
Jenison was telling Penn about
this Vermeer obsession,
and Penn said hold on
we're going to make a film of this.
To cut a long story short,
Penn and Teller made a film,
over a period of four years,
about the construction of this room
the painting of this picture.
The result was released last year
called Tim's Vermeer,
it was shortlisted for an Oscar and
nominated for a BAFTA,
we didn't get either of them,
but it's on video now.
I won't show you any clips,
but I'll show you some stills.
Now here is Jenison's device
it's very simple,
it's a mirror on a stick.
It's a metal mirror,
it's got one reflective surface
and what you do,
what you do,
you've got the mirror here,
a little 45 degree metal mirror
suppose you've got a lens here
casting an image onto a screen here
so you put your canvas flat
next to the optical image
so here's the image of the scene,
the scene's over here.
We look down and in the mirror
we can see part of the optical image
and if we look past the mirror edge
we can see the canvas.
We apply paint
and we find experimentally a colour
that matches the tone in the mirror
and if they've got a really good match
you can't see the edge of the mirror,
and that's it,
that's how it works.
You work across the whole canvas.
Now this solves my two problems,
first of all,
the reversal of the image,
it's a mirror,
so it mirrors it back again.
Second was working in low light
this solves that problem
because everything we see
is in low light
you've got one illumination source,
the windows in the studio
illuminating the canvas in low light
and the optical image in low light
but everything tracks together.
If a cloud goes over the sun,
all the lighting goes down,
the canvas is less well-lit
the optical image is not so bright,
but once you've got a match it works
in low-light and out of the cubicle.
Jenison invited me and my wife
to San Antonio.
This is me.
This is the producers and cast
of Tim's Vermeer,
this is Tim Jenison,
this is Teller
who directed the film
this is Penn and David Hockney,
who's in the film,
and there's me.
Jenison and I when I went to Texas,
decided to paint a vase together,
with his device.
We both painted,
it didn't really matter,
and this is the result,
for what it's worth.
It seemed to work,
we were encouraged,
Jenison then spent about 7 months
building and furnishing the set
as for 'The Music Lesson'.
There he is,
he's bought a C17th carpet,
and a Delftware vase
made in Delft,
there's the virginals,
dummies for figures at this point.
There he is,
he's decided to grind lenses himself,
to grind his own paints.
There he is making a chair leg.
Attaching the printed paper decoration
to the virginals.
This is his daughter Claire,
who stood in for the girl,
she had to stand still,
so she had her head clamped,
and this is the studio as a whole,
looking backwards here,
the front wall that we see
is to our right.
This is the virginals from the top
here's Claire,
the windows,
and this is Jenison at work over here
with his optical apparatus.
You may wonder why
he hasn't got a booth
the reason is that
fairly soon he struck serious problems.
It's possible to see
with a simple booth camera
a lot of detail
you get a very nice picture
but when you work on things
like the painted paper decorations
he found that it wasn't sharp enough
or bright enough to work.
So he was cast down
in the film he says
it seemed like a deal killer
but he thought about this
and he came up with a solution
in place of the white screen
he was projecting onto previously
he put a plain flat mirror.
And that increased
the brightness of the image
he doesn't have to see it
all at once of course.
It increased the brightness by an
order of magnitude.
In fact in this set up he substituted
a concave mirror with the same effect.
This is his sketch of the
final arrangement he painted with.
It's easier to see down here,
the flat canvas,
the camera obscura lens
that casted the image
a 45 degree mirror
and at the back instead of the screen
he's got this concave mirror
or he could have had a flat mirror.
He found that the image
was now so bright
he could take away the walls
of the camera
and work in the open
which is what you saw in that slide.
Well, this is the final painting,
Vermeer on the left,
Jenison on the right.
Let's remind ourselves
what we're looking at.
On the left is a painted canvas piece
from the seventeenth century.
On the right is the
transcription in paint
of the optical image created
of a scene set up
in a warehouse in Texas.
It's not the same,
even geometrically as Vermeer's.
Obviously the two figures are different
there are differences in the geometry
the painting is much brighter here
there's a different distance
from the wall to the virginals.
If you were able to see
the paintings in close up
you would detect
a certain mechanical quality
to Jenison's painting,
a certain painting by numbers feel,
but of course nobody's pretending
Jenison's a great artist
least of all him.
This is an experiment
to test a technical hypothesis,
does the method work.
My view, I don't know what you think
is that it is a triumphant yes.
It's possible with a optical device
that could have been made in the C17th
to produce Vermeer like results,
to produce optical qualities
that we recognise as Vermeer.
Have we got time?
I'm just going to do...
I think one of the most
successful parts in Jenison's painting
from a technical point of view,
is the carpet.
So we're going to have a straw poll.
Very unscientific.
I'm going to ask you to identify.
Here's Vermeer's carpet
and Jenison's carpet.
Those of you who think the top image
is Vermeer put up your hands.
Okay.
About ten people.
And those of you who think
the bottom image is Vermeer's.
Well, the majority has it,
you're right.
Some of you might have spotted
the cracks in the paintwork.
Or you have good memories
of the real painting!
I've shown it enough times!
Some of you put up your hands,
it doesn't prove anything,
we're looking at projected images.
The big question that remains is
did Vermeer work this way?
Did he invent something like
Jenison's mirrored instrument
and turn himself into
a transcription machine?
I'm not sure I've made up my mind
I go back and forward.
Jenison and I have looked hard
at C17th literature
to find a description
of something like this.
We've looked at the
literature of painting techniques
we've looked at books on optics and
natural magic and perspective,
we've found some suggestive hints
but nothing definitive.
For me the most powerful evidence
is not greatly emphasised in the film
it has to do with tonality
the subject with which we started.
Look again once last time
at 'The Music Lesson',
look at the far wall
up at the top
and I think you'll see it as a wall
painted in this yellowish tone
and it's perhaps brighter at the left
than it is at the right
because it's illuminated from the left.
Here's a detail from a high scan image
from Buckingham Palace.
So this is this piece of wall.
If you take a small part,
using the Photoshop program,
from the right hand side
and move it to the left
and we take a small part of the left
and move it to the right.
This is the result.
Do you believe that?
I don't believe it and
I've seen it many times.
But it's true.
The reason we don't see it is
our minds are hard-wired not to,
not even Vermeer could have seen it.
You just cannot see
a shadow gradient in tone like that.
When we see two tones
against each other
we can see relative tone,
we can compare
but our minds and brains and eyes
are not light meters.
So here is something that
Vermeer has reproduced
that he could not have seen
but he could have done it
with some sort of device
that allowed you to
reproduce tones precisely.
Here's another last example.
This is from Jenison's picture.
This is at the point when
he's painted the floor tiles
and you can perhaps see that
some of these on the left
are in shadow
but we see them as black and white.
Now let's step back in time
and look at the picture when
he's just painted the white tiles
you'll see the white tiles
are dark grey
because you're not looking at them
against the black.
In fact the darkest white tile is
darker than the lightest black tile.
Tim Jenison reproduces this effect
as does Vermeer.
I believe there
can now be little doubt
that Vermeer used
some kind of optical instrument
that allowed him to match
tonal values in paint exactly,
but what this might mean
for Vermeer studies
for the wider history of art
the wider history of photography,
would be another whole lecture.
So thank you very much,
thank you for listening.
Thank you Phil
a really fantastic talk.
It was such a full lecture
we've run out of time for questions,
so I suggest if anyone has a question,
to grab Phil as we wrap up.
So no time to take questions
from the audience on camera,
we'll finish now and if anyone wants
to ask Phil a question come forward.
Thank you.
