Art Chowder November | December 2017, Issue 12 | Page 35

N
ot all reviewers were so taken with
the film.
“Tim’s Vermeer is a film
about a man who totally
fails to paint a Vermeer.”
-The Guardian
“Tim’s not-Vermeer”
-Art History News 3 1
These seem to be the exceptions, but
they have a point, because the resem-
blance to Vermeer is all on the surface.
Although hyped in the movie trailer as
an “Epic Quest” and in Penn Jillette’s
enthusiastic narration of his friend’s sto-
ry, all the pains Tim took for the lengthy
project—the outcome, indeed the whole
process—display little knowledge of
Vermeer and his works.
Some of the people who best know an
artist’s works and processes are the
conservators and scientists who have
been intimately involved with the actual
paintings, close up. For example, Danish
conservator and Vermeer scholar Jørgen
Wadum, who restored the Girl with a
Pearl Earring, discovered that thirteen
of Vermeer’s paintings have pinholes
right at the location of the central van-
ishing point, a very strong indication
that the artist constructed his perspective
geometrically, i.e. according to normal
Renaissance methods, not optically. The
pin would be attached to a string that had
been coated with chalk, forming what
amounts to a snap line, such as those
used by carpenters, to mark the orthogo-
nals, a process known to have been used
by other artists of the period.
With all the optical device-fever that has
been generated in recent years, especial-
ly in the popular mind, it is important to
bear in mind that, unlike Tim Jenison’s
ill-informed notion that Vermeer was
more or less a “geek”—an inventive
experimenter like himself—Vermeer was
an artist like others of his time. As head-
man of the Guild of St. Luke, he very
much knew how to draw conventionally,
as can be seen in his earlier works that
show no relation to optical devices, such
as his Christ in the House of Martha and
Mary.
Johannes Vermeer
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
c. 1654–1656
Oil on canvas
63 x 55 7/8”
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Although Tim claims to have used bona
fide Vermeer pigments, he used them
in a way altogether unlike what Ver-
meer actually did. Tim painted directly,
mixing the colors to match what he saw
in the mirror in one go. Vermeer painted
indirectly, building up the painting in a
succession of layers that included glazes,
which allow light to pass through and
reflect back to create a deeply luminous
stained glass window effect, with an
interplay of transparent and opaque ef-
fects. Vermeer was not a finicky painter.
His brushwork is efficient and confident.
Insofar as Tim took the trouble to find
out the pigments Vermeer used, one
wonders why he neglected to look closer
into sources that were readily available
at the time of his experiment, which
supply insights into the artist’s creative
process. 2
One reason that comes to mind is that,
if he’d tried to use his optical device to
even come close to replicating Vermeer’s
real painting process, he would have got-
ten basically nowhere. It better served
the movie’s purpose to develop the story
of all Tim’s travels and travails.
November | December 2017
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