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Vermeer and Virtual Realities
Vermeer and the Delft School, National Gallery, London, 20 June — 16
September 2001
This important exhibition comes to the National
Gallery with one riddle solved: the historian and academic, Professor
Philip Steadman, has largely settled the long-standing question
of Vermeer's perspective technique. Previously, for one thing, no
one could understand why Vermeer's work showed no signs of underdrawing
as would be usual for the period. Steadman has addressed the whole
question in his new book, Vermeer's Camera
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| Johannes Vermeer.
‘The Milkmaid’. About 1657-8 |
He argues that the artist must have installed himself to paint
from the inside of an all-enveloping Camera Obscura. Vermeer
relied on lens technology too, then advancing locally in Holland
for seamanship purposes, to project the outline of the object or
model in view straight on to the canvas surface. Invariably, as
with lens viewing, planes would slip in or out of focus; this effect
is perpetrated in Vermeer's paintings in the exhibition. Nor did
any drawings whatever survive his posterity.
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| Pieter de Hooch.
‘A Woman drinking with Two Men, and a Serving Woman’.
About 1658 |
Perhaps too, it is the mysterious privacy of the sitters' expressions
that explains the implied voyeurism of the artist himself, as the
result of the distancing of the painter within the apparatus as
set up, leaving the sitter curiously 'alone'.
Professor Steadman, a professor of the Built Environment, and an
architect by training, has made a lifetime study of Vermeer's technique.
In one key painting on exhibition entitled, ‘Allegory of the
Faith’, Steadman analysed reflections in a lobe placed right
at the back of the scene, and explored the significance of a strange
black box where the Camera Obscura apparatus would have been
positioned.
This exhibition comes to London from the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, where it was heavily oversubscribed. However, Vermeer
has only been the subject of one true retrospective, held in l995
in Washington DC. Some 35 or so works by Vermeer still exist, including
‘The Concert’, presumably taken from the Gardner Museum
in Boston in l990, and never returned.
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