That’s the question posed by Texan inventor Tim Jenison, who sets out to scratch beneath the veneer of Vermeer to find out what lay behind the legendary lifelike quality of the Dutch master’s paintings.
Johannes Vermeer painted during the seventeenth century and his pieces were notable for being exceptionally true-to-life. The “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, which later inspired a novel and film of the same name, is one of Vermeer’s best known works.
Jenison asks how Vermeer could have created such realistic works 150 years before the invention of photography. Over eight years, the American enthusiast travels to Delft in Holland, Buckingham Palace and even meets David Hockney in Yorkshire to uncover the role which optics may have played in Vermeer’s work.
Tim’s Vermeer will be out in UK cinemas from 17th January 2014 through Sony.
In This Story: Netherlands
The Netherlands, informally Holland, is a country primarily located in Western Europe and partly in the Caribbean, forming the largest constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In Europe, it consists of 12 provinces that border Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, with maritime borders in the North Sea with those countries and the United Kingdom. In the Caribbean, it consists of three special municipalities: the islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba. The country’s official language is Dutch, with West Frisian as a secondary official language in the province of Friesland, and English and Papiamentu as secondary official languages in the Caribbean Netherlands. Dutch Low Saxon and Limburgish are recognised regional languages (spoken in the east and southeast respectively), while Sinte Romani and Yiddish are recognised non-territorial languages.