Explanation of photo-realistic painting by Jan Vermeer

Jan Vermeer, “Music Lesson” (1662-1665)

Known in the Amiga and Siggraph community, hacker Tim Jenison (Tim Jenison) spent many months reproducing the supposed painting technique used by the Dutch artist Jan Vermeer in the middle of the 17th century. Until now, it remains unclear how he could create such photorealistic paintings for a century and a half before the invention of photography.

As an expert in computer graphics, Tim Jenison was confident that the artist used some kind of image capture technique, including copying color. Some details of the pictures clearly indicate this. For example, the texture of the white wall in the picture "Music Lesson".

Tim Jenison explains that the wall is painted the way a camera lens would capture it. The fact is that human vision adapts to the lighting and simply cannot register a shadow on the wall with such a contrast. To an outsider, such an argument may seem dubious, but for an expert like Jenison, this is absolutely reliable proof that Vermeer used some sort of image transfer technique on canvas.
')
Jenison set himself the task of repeating the Vermeer method. The camera obscura is not suitable for this purpose, because it does not provide the desired color rendition. Logically, Tim Jenison concluded that the Dutch painter had somehow used a mirror to copy an image.


Tim Jenison is testing a hypothesis with a mirror

To test the hypothesis, Jenison decided to recreate the original scene from the picture “Music Lesson”, and then draw it with the help of a mirror, as Vermeer could do.

The experiment took eight (!) Months, Jenison found a suitable room and printed objects from the picture on a 3D printer, others were made on different machines.









In the end, he still managed to copy from the mirror a picture that replicates the original as much as possible.


Tim Jenison Picture

All the time, there was a film crew working with Jennison, who shot 2400 hours of video and edited an 80-minute documentary .