Has A Vermeer Mystery Been Solved?

“We didn’t know the outcome,” says Teller, whose father was a commercial artist and mother an amateur painter. “The question did seriously arise: Is this going to work or not? I asked Tim, ‘What if this doesn’t succeed?’ He said, ‘Then there won’t be a movie.’ I said, ‘Yes, there will beâ€"it’ll just be a different one.’” Penn and Teller installed cameras in Jenison’s studio to record everything. In the end, they would have 2,400 hours of video to turn into an 80-minute movie, now called Tim’s Vermeer, which Sony is releasing nationally in February. David Stork, an imaging scientist and former Stanford professor with a side career in computer-aided art analysis, was the major scientific critic of Hockney and Steadman a decade ago. One of his main counterarguments was that using only a camera obscura, Vermeer would have had to paint upside down and the projected image would be too dim to be useful. Jenison figured out that using a second mirror solves both problems. So in his apparatus, the image is projected through the 4-inch lens onto a 7-inch concave mirror on the opposite wall, and then onto the 2-inch-by-4-inch mirror he’d have right in front of his face as he painted. A second mirror makes the image right side up and not backward. And it has the added advantage of making the image reflected in the little second mirror, the bit he’s actually copying, vastly brighter and clearer.

For his experimental purposesâ€"using a device that Vermeer himself could have madeâ€"Jenison decided that modern lenses are too fine. So he learned how to make lenses himself, to melt and polish glass using 17th-century techniques. Jenison painted only with pigments available in the late 1600s and learned to mix them himself, including grinding lapis lazuli stones (“they’re kind of poisonous,” he points out) to make ultramarine blue.

Vermeer painted The Music Lesson in a first-floor room in his mother-in-law’s house. “We know, historically, everything about that room in Delft. And this building”â€"Jenison was now referring to his little one-story warehouse in Texasâ€"“has the same north-northwest angle to the sun.” Because the buildings across the Oude Langendijk canal would have blocked some of the light, Jenison erected false Dutch façades outside on the San Antonio pavement. Inside, piece by piece, he constructed a life-size reproduction of Vermeer’s roomâ€"wooden beams, checkerboard floor, plastered walls. He had the porcelain platter made, and the pitcher on it, by a potter in Delft. He made the chair himself, copying one in a Delft museum. He also built the prop harpsichord. “I started off going as authentic as possible,” Jenison says. “I realized I could commission or learn to make stained glass. But I decided I didn’t need another major hobby at that point in time. I cheated on the glass.” The stained-glass windows are in fact stained Plexiglas. All the physical preparations took about eight months.

When I first talked with Jenison, three years ago, in his fully completed fake Delft music room, he was six weeks into the painting, working every afternoon for a couple of hours. He had just completed the checkerboard floor. He thought the technique seemed to be working. But he had another eight months of almost daily work ahead of him. He was proceeding through trial and error, millimeter by millimeter, fiddling with the paint until the edge he saw between the tiny piece of image in his mirror and on his painted picture dissolved and disappeared.

He was rigorous about painting only what he saw in his mirror, rather than referring to a reproduction of the Vermeer. Or to his gobsmacking memory of examining the real thing for 30 minutes on a wall in Buckingham Palace, wearing a surgeon’s binocular magnifiers. “We talked the Queen into showing it to us. I was, ‘Oh my God.’ It’s totally different from the reproductions. It’s more muted and bluish.” The biggest differences were the crazily meticulous detailsâ€"the silver thread at the bottom of the woman’s skirt, the key ring on the teacher. In terms of detail, “It was goofy what he did on the harpsichord. It was eye-opening, astounding to see. I had no idea. My biggest takeaway was that I was an idiot. There’s so much in it.”

When I talked to him again recently, long after the painting and Teller’s documentary were done, I asked about his learning curve over the 220 hours he spent with brush in hand. “I started with the ceiling beams. They look horrible. I hadn’t thinned the paint. I was worried about how you make a smooth gradient, so my daughter showed me that. My brush stroke did get better. By the time I got to the rug I knew how to handle the brush. Not that I could sit down and paint anything today without the apparatus. It’d be a piece of shit.”

Jenison still sounds a little surprised at how he has spent so much of the past decade. He believes he fully succeeded in his mission, but being who he is, he’s not exactly doing an end-zone dance. “It’s probably kind of important” is as far as he’ll go. When we first met, he told me he was 80 percent sure Vermeer used an optical apparatus and a procedure something like his own. After he finished his picture, his confidence was up to 90 percent. Lately, after examining a high-resolution scan of the painting provided by Buckingham Palace, he’s 95 percent sure. The most doubt-inducing part of the mystery for him remains how Vermeer kept the trade secret secret. “That’s the killer argument. That’s the best one there is. I’ve got a file of counterarguments to my own theory.”

But his collaborators aren’t fazed at all by the conspiracy-of-silence issue. “How much of history is lost!” Teller says. “We’re not talking about an age where people put things up on the Internet. There are magic tricks whose descriptions don’t exist.” And Jillette is emphatic, as he tends to be: “Tim’s device is Vermeer’s device! I have no doubt. Tim can give you all the doubt you want, but I have none. It’s not the kind of thing you write down! The photorealistic painters of our time, none of them share their techniques. The Spiderman people aren’t talking to the Avatar people. When [David] Copperfield and I have lunch, we aren’t giving away absolutely everything.”

The crux of the resistance to the idea that Vermeer invented and used an optical device, beyond technical and historiographic issues, is that it diminishes our sense of Vermeer’s genius. But great artists in every age use clever new tools and technologies. You could give all the digital contraptions Alfonso Cuarón used on Gravity to a hack director and he’d make a crappy movie. Pro Tools software doesn’t turn a mediocre musician into a great one, but great ones depend on it. Chuck Close bases paintings on photographs and uses a mechanical lift to move his enormous canvases around as he works on them. As Jenison says of the history of art, “perspective is an algorithm, a ‘device’” invented in the 15th century to paint more realistic illusions.

“One of the things I learned about the world of art,” Teller says, “is there are people who really want to believe in magic, that artists are supernatural beingsâ€"there was some guy who could walk up and do that. But art is work like anything elseâ€"concentration, physical pain. Part of the subject of this movie is that a great work of art should seem to have magically sprung like a miracle on the wall. But to get that miracle is an enormous, aggravating pain.” To see Vermeer as “a god” makes him “a discouraging bore,” Teller went on. But if you think of him as a genius artist and an inventor, he becomes a hero: “Now he can inspire.”

And Tim Jenisonâ€"definitely not a great artist, but certainly a great artificerâ€"is inspiring too, whether or not Vermeer used a device like the one Jenison used in Texas. When I ask what new quest he’s on, Jenison says, “I don’t have a current obsession. I’m between obsessions.”