Vermeer and the Camera Obscura

Page 2 of 6

• 1. Controversial methods
• 2. Camera Obscura
• 3. Vermeer's techniques
• 4. Visual evidence
• 5. Vermeer's room
• 6. Find out more
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Camera Obscura

An image of a cubicle-type camera, with a lens, was published in The Great Art of Light and Shadow by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher in 1646. It is a rather eccentric diagram, but the principle is sound enough. In this design the image is projected onto a translucent screen, made perhaps of oiled paper or ground glass, and the artist looks at it on the far side of the screen, away from the scene - an arrangement first suggested by Leonardo da Vinci. This has the advantage that the user does not get in the way of the light.

Most of the literature of the camera obscura available when Vermeer was working, in the third quarter of the 17th century, describes instruments that took the form of closed rooms, tents or cubicles (like Kircher's design), which the user worked inside. It has sometimes been suggested that Vermeer might have used a camera of a rather different kind, which certainly existed in his time, but which was only manufactured in large numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and which took the form of a closed box, with an external translucent screen. The observer is now outside the box, not inside it. Both Canaletto's and Reynolds's cameras were of this type. One problem compared with the room-type camera is that the image is viewed under ambient light and so seems subjectively less bright. Fox Talbot and the French pioneers of photography, Niépce and Daguerre, built the first photographic cameras by modifying commercially produced camera obscuras of this general type.

Why have people imagined that Vermeer might have been a camera user? There is absolutely no documentary evidence to support this idea. The only source of information is the paintings themselves. The first person to make the suggestion, as long ago as 1891, was the American graphic artist Joseph Pennell, who pointed to what he called the 'photographic perspective' of Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl. The two figures sit very close across the corner of the table. But the image of the officer's head is about twice as wide as that of the smiling girl. The perspective is perfectly correct in a geometrical sense: the discrepancy arises because the viewpoint of the picture is close to the soldier. We are quite familiar today with foreground objects appearing very large in snapshots. But in 17th-century painting this is rather unusual, and Vermeer's contemporaries would have made human figures in a composition of this kind much more nearly equal in size.

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Published: 2002-09-23