Sorcha Brooks, “Experimentation with Optical Tools, Perspective Techniques, and Gender Relations in the Early Dutch Republic,” BOZetto, Vol. 6 (Autumn 2018), 1-7.

 

 

            The Dutch Republic attracted scientists and mathematicians from all over Europe who made groundbreaking discoveries in astronomy, physics, optics, and light. Optical instruments, such as the microscope and telescope, were crucial in the development of these new sciences. According to Hanneke Grootenboer, “the paintings of the Golden Age are testimonials to this preoccupation with a scientific mode of observing and describing every thinkable detail of the visible world.”[1] Johannes Vermeer, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Carel Fabritius shared the Dutch obsession with the scientific and meticulous recording of the visual world. These artists experimented with optical and illusionistic perspective devices and conventions such as the camera obscura, peep show box, and trompe l’oeil. However, there seems to be a recognizable variation in the choice of the device, and how each scene is constructed around male and female subjects. In this essay, I intend to scrutinize each perspective tool and convention, assess its effectiveness, determine what it contributed to the artist’s development, and relate these techniques to the artist’s choice to depict women in interior scenes and men in outdoor spaces. I expect that I will find evidence that Vermeer, Hoogstraten, and Fabritius employed perspective devices in order to perfect and distort their perspectives of the world within existing Dutch conventions of representation.

 

            It is impossible to overstate the seventeenth century Dutch artist’s determination to perfect their approximation of the natural world. Hoogstraten writes that a faultless painting is a “mirror of nature” and he equates the artist with the scientist, stating, “painting is a science for depicting all ideas, or mental images, that the entire visible world can provide: and deceiving the eye with outline and color.”[2] These remarks reveal a preference for the perfect and scientific imitation of nature above that of idealized beauty. The Dutch artist employed new technologies to achieve a “perfect imitation of nature.”  The camera obscura was perhaps the best tool for directly and empirically representing the natural world.

 

            Although Vermeer left frustratingly little physical evidence to suggest he used a camera obscura (such as contemporary written accounts, drawings of his working procedure, or diagrams of preparatory perspective layouts), scholars are generally in agreement that Vermeer’s unique style exhibits visual characteristics indicative of the device (figure 1). A camera obscura uses a small pinhole to project an inverted image onto an opposite wall, from which an artist can make quick sketches. The device was later improved by replacing the pinhole with a converging lens. Irene Netta argues that Vermeer differed from other Delft artists is the way he “translates his subjects into art”; his aim was not to produce a “perfect painting” in terms of perspective, but instead, to use his own artistic ideas to “create a spatial illusion and to influence the viewer’s perspective.” [3] The camera obscura would have benefitted Vermeer in many ways. Arthur K. Wheelock describes the camera obscura as “an excellent artistic aid, for it required only that an artist have the ability to handle color to copy directly after nature.”[4] The artist could place both himself and the sitter very carefully according to the strength of light in a room, outline and record their positions, transfer the drawings to a painting surface, and finish the work without the camera.[5] 

 

            Evidence of a camera obscura’s use can be found in the geometry of Vermeer’s work, and The Music Lesson (figure 2) is perhaps the best example. Philip Steadman meticulously studied the room depicted in The Music Lesson with the goal of reconstructing the space physically, as well as in a set of diagrams. Steadman used the diagonal lines of the tile, the angle of the windows, and the reflection in the mirror on the far wall to create a theoretical room, where he then placed the artist and his easel, the camera and lens, the figures, and the objects in the room. Steadman puts enormous importance on the mirror behind the piano, which allowed him to more accurately recreate the room, and whose reflection may include part of Vermeer’s camera obscura.[6] Steadman expanded this procedure to study and compare six of Vermeer’s paintings, and determined that the viewpoint (or location of a camera) is almost exactly the same for all. Steadman says this “extraordinary geometrical coincidence” may be explained by optical compositional techniques, but the most convincing interpretation is the use of a camera obscura.[7] It can be reasonably deduced, therefore, that Vermeer sectioned off and darkened one end of the room for the camera and the screen behind it. Steadman, Kemp, and Mills agree that Vermeer’s nearly perfect perspective and contrasts of scale reflect his use of a camera obscura.

 

Perhaps the most convincing evidence of Vermeer’s use of a camera obscura is his “soft focus” rendering of objects outside the focal plane. A distinct example is The Milkmaid (figure 3). One of the first considerations of an artist using the camera obscura is where to focus the lens, and, if Vermeer did use this device in The Milkmaid, he focused the camera on the back wall. Objects farther away from this wall are increasingly out of focus, a characteristic still seen in modern photography at a low aperture. Historian and photographer Daniel A. Fink points out that the back wall is “rendered so sharply as to show every nail hole and imperfection in the plaster,” while the basket of bread towards the front of the room is much more loose and fuzzy.[8]  Vermeer’s loose rendering of highlights also suggests his use of a camera obscura. Charles Seymour Jr. was drawn to Vermeer’s depiction of highlights as “dots of heavily loaded pigment.”[9] A highlight takes the shape of the light source it reflects, but Vermeer renders reflections of light on polished surfaces as circles or near-circles in contrast with how highlights appear in reality. Seymour proposes that these so-called “circles” or “discs of halation” are formed through a loss of focus, a problem with the still-rudimentary camera.[10] This effect is prominent in Girl with a Red Hat (figure 4). As the plane of focus shifts forward, away from the focus point at the outline of the girl’s white collar, the image rapidly loses its crispness and highlights form as discs of halation. A “gradient of focus” forms between the collar and even her earring, which is relatively close to the focal point.

 

            These paintings and the vast majority of Vermeer’s work all depict women in interior spaces, usually consumed with household work. These scenes are obviously created from a man’s perspective. Seventeenth-century Dutch women contributed to the household while their husbands worked as merchants, traders, sailors, farmers, civic soldiers, or skilled laborers in the surrounding city or country. Susanah Shaw Romney, in an examination of Dutch colonialism in the seventeenth century, sees this as a theme of Dutch culture: “As merchants and planners sought profitable global exchange, they repeatedly invoked the idea that women and the households they created could support commerce.”[11] It is important to note how Vermeer chose to show these women: they are not allegories of vanitas, nor are they “damsels in distress,” popular and accepted conventions in European art; he made a conscious choice to celebrate the physical connection between women and their homes. The woman in The Milkmaid brings the scene to life: her work creates action, a focal point, and tells the story of her life, however small our view of it is. Her gaze is down (not dreamily out the window) and she is focused entirely on her task. Perhaps these were bought as a gift by a husband, eager to demonstrate his love and appreciation for the hard-working, loyal, and pious core of their household. Perhaps, when seeing the gift, a housewife is reminded of her part in her husband’s life, and her place in the larger network of Dutch society.

 

Dutch paintings of women at work in the home developed into a completely novel art form: the peep show box, a triangular or rectangular wooden cabinet whose interior is painted on two or three sides as well as on the top and bottom and whose exterior is perhaps meant to represent a kunstkasten, which stored rare and valuable objects. This short-lived genre of illusion is unique to the Dutch during the seventeenth century; it may have originated in Haarlem and was developed by the Delft school of painters.[12]  Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Perspective Box with Views of a Dutch Interior (figure 5) is an effective example in a number of ways. The outside of the box is painted with allegorical figures representing Venus, Cupid, and Minerva. It stands on a heavy wood pedestal about two feet tall. One side is left open, perhaps intended to be covered with a specially treated sheet of paper, and the box is placed near a light source. The box is designed to draw in a curious viewer and astonish him or her with a perfectly rendered illusion of the interior of a nine-room Dutch home. The viewer is invited to “enter” the painting though small peepholes.

 

Looking inside the box, the viewer is confronted with the illusion of a three-dimensional interior of a perfectly peaceful home. The rooms appear empty at first, but careful examination leads the eye to a small dog, a sleeping woman, another woman reading a book next to a window, and a little boy peeking inside. The boxes cleverly incorporate anamorphic images, which appear distorted when seen from the “incorrect” viewpoint but correct when viewed from the intentionally fixed point. As the viewer inspects the scene through one of the two peepholes, the two-dimensional paintings illusionistically appear three-dimensional inside the box. Therefore, the peep show box manipulates the spectator both physically and emotionally so that he or she feels included inside the miniature scene.

 

How these boxes were created is largely unknown, and there are only six boxes remaining from the seventeenth century to serve as evidence. Philip Steadman outlines two proposed methods for constructing them: the first involves stretching strings from a viewing point through the picture plane and marking out respective points on an oblique plane. The second involves lighting models from an angle with a bright light and drawing out their cast shadows on the “wall” inside the peep show box.[13]  It is absolutely crucial that the anamorphic projections align from the viewer’s perspective from the two peepholes. The creation of this box meant careful distortion studies and numerous trial-and-error experiments.[14] Bomford examines the individual panels of Pieter Janssens Elinga’s Perspective Box with View of a Voorhuis (figure 6). Elinga’s box is triangular, with a steeply receding interior scene of a tall room. The foreground shows a water kettle, a tin, a teapot, and two porcelain teacups set on a table. Behind, a woman sews, a maid sweeps, a man walks down a staircase, and a little dog looks on. Bomford argues that planning the three-dimensional perspectives is “simpler than it looks,” dependent on conventional perspective.[15] The principle vanishing point for both panels must be directly opposite the peephole, and two lateral points become the distance points. The artist can use pins to mark key points, then use these points to map out the geometry of the room on a temporarily constructed box interior. Next, the ceiling beams and floor tile pattern would be sketched, then the box is carefully checked for errors and dismantled for painting, and finally permanently constructed.

 

Thijs Weststeijn argues that Van Hoogstraten intended to appeal emotionally to the viewer, thus ensuring that his work left a lasting impression on the viewer, citing evidence of Van Hoogstraten’s study of art theorist Franciscus Junius.”[16]  As Weststeijn states, “Junius and Van Hoogstraten suppose that the spectator who is affectively stirred by the image is completely, that is, mentally and physically, transported into the painting’s virtual reality.”[17] Van Hoogstraten seems to acknowledge this in his book on art theory, writing, “It is not enough for a picture to be beautiful, it must have in it a certain moving quality…. Artists do not stir the mind if they omit this moving quality.”[18] By involving the viewer so completely in his perspective box, Van Hoogstraten aims to create emotion on a level that surpasses a canvas on the wall. Furthermore, Van Hoogstraten sought to use his art to elevate the intellectual status of painting, and to equate this work to the emotional level of poetry or theater.

 

Herman Colenbrander explores the purpose the perspective box was meant to serve and believes it is related to wedding festivities, and may have been Van Hoogstraten’s gift to his bride. Based on this assumption, he reconstructs a tentative narrative scene on the interior. As viewed from the peephole on the right, the scene is one of a man’s domain and representations of his love, loyalty, Christian education, and public position. From the peephole on the left, the scene is a woman’s domain and representations of her loyalty, temperance, modesty, faith, and her duty as a mother and a housewife. Susanah Shaw Romney sums up the Dutch social structure as follows: “Through work, marriage, and reproduction, women formed an essential part of the foundation on which the whole [social] structure rested. Marriage, then, formed the basis not just of political culture but of civilized life as the Dutch imagined it.”[19] Colenbrander therefore interprets the perspective box as a promise to Van Hoogstraten’s bride of married domestic happiness in their future home.[20]

 

            Some scholars have argued that these scenes are inherently misogynistic: Dutch men felt threatened by women’s role in managing the household and perhaps even the business while he was away. Therefore, the artist painted these women in typical domestic scenes as a way to instruct women and remind them of their place. I disagree entirely. If one considers only the way Dutch art was marketed, bought, and sold, it becomes obvious that these images increased the working woman’s visibility in Dutch culture, and underscored the necessity of a well-educated, capable, and independent housewife. Upon examining the subjects, it is apparent the women are concentrating on their tasks, unconcerned with the viewer's gaze. A critical missing piece is the perspective of a seventeenth century Dutch woman upon looking into Van Hoogstraten’s box, or at one of Vermeer’s interiors.  It is significant that Vermeer and Van Hoogstraten chose to depict women in positions of power and influence.  Feminist art historian Elizabeth Honig argues that Dutch women would have decided which paintings to display in their own homes, and therefore, artists responded by creating work that appealed to a Dutch woman’s ideals.[21] The ramifications of this theory are enormous: a Dutch woman had more control over her home country’s art economy than any women before her. Furthermore, the Dutch home was a symbol not only of the woman’s domestic responsibilities but also a man’s citizenship, social position, and civic responsibilities. A huysgezin (a collection of family, kin, and servants who lived together) established a man’s political identity.[22] Upon viewing a scene of a Dutch interior, the man is also reminded of his duties, and the important role played by his wife.

 

            Another unusual development in Dutch painting is presented in a flat canvas that features a man located somewhere between domestic and urban spheres: Carel Fabritius’ View of Delft (1660; figure 7).  In an exceptionally wide-angle perspective, the burgher (perhaps Fabritius himself) sits alone in a contemplative pose beside musical instruments at left and facing the Nieuwe Kerk at center and Town Hall at right as if urging a choice between business and pleasure. Fabritius was unequalled in his employment of perspective. The system adopted here is certainly unconventional: the viewer enters the painting by degrees and carefully scans its unsettled contents. The man and cityscape seem to exist “in a different spatial orientation.”[23] Perhaps the painting was meant to be inserted into a perspective box, physically bent along the Y-axis, or curved into a semi-circle.[24] Perhaps the picture was meant to encapsulate an alternative mode of viewing through a “double concave lens.”[25]  Walter A. Liedtke studied two versions of View of Delft: the flat canvas and a photograph of the painting mounted on a hemicylindrical surface. Comparison revealed a consistent change, which Liedtke described as “transformations ingeniously anticipated by Fabritius.”[26] The painting changes in subtle ways on the right: shadows become three-dimensional, the house becomes a credible structure, the bridges correctly span the canal, and the church's proportions are corrected. On the left, changes are much more dramatic: the table and trellis stand perpendicularly, the man’s body appears slimmer and gains “proper” scale, and the viola da gamba regains its symmetrical form.[27] Based on this evidence, I think it is reasonable to say that Fabritius intended this flat image to be viewed with this heightened sense of curved space, as if to encourage visual wandering through the space. Fabritius was formulating his own pictorial conventions as an outgrowth of empirical observation. 

 

            But why include a pensive man in this outdoor scene? He is alone except for the minuscule figure of a woman walking on the other side of the street. Did Fabritius mean to suggest that one man is no more or no less important than nature, church, or society?  The man exists on a spatial plane different from that of the rest of the scene. I propose that the viewer is meant to project him or herself into the figure, which would be especially effective if viewed through a perspective box, and to contemplate the cityscape with the goal of instilling pride in Dutch land, monuments, and/or society as signs of virtue through accomplishment. This can further explain the inclusion of the viola da gamba—a symbol of Dutch pleasure or temptation—turned to the wall as if forsaken. But the painting thrives on ambiguity, a visual discourse on the limits of human perception and representation or a self-reflexive exhibition of the possibilities of the viewing experience.

 

            In conclusion, careful examination of works by Vermeer, Van Hoogstraten, and Fabritius, in relation to the camera obscura, peep show box, and trompe l’oeil effect, gives insight into the importance of art and science in seventeenth century Dutch culture. Use of these devices allowed the artists to perfect and experiment with perspective while at the same time delight the viewer with something new and different. These artists shared the belief that the viewer should not be confronted by an artwork, but by a convincing virtual and social reality.

 

ENDNOTES

 

[1] Hanneke Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 4.

 

[2] Thijs Weststeijn, Beverley Jackson, and Lynne Richards, The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten's Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 86.

 

[3] Irene Netta, Vermeer's World: An Artist and His Town (Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2004), 31, 73.

 

[4] Arthur K. Wheelock, “Carel Fabritius: Perspective and Optics in Delft,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 24 (1973): 69. 

 

[5] Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 196.

 

[6] Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87.

 

[7] Ibid., 106-107.

 

[8] Daniel Fink, “Vermeer's Use of the Camera Obscura - a Comparative Study,” Art Bulletin, 53, 4 (December 1971): 496.

 

[9] Charles Seymour, “Dark Chamber and Light-Filled Room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura.” The Art Bulletin, 46, 3 (1964): 325.

 

[10] Seymour, 1964, 325.

 

[11] Susanah Shaw Romney, “‘With & alongside His Housewife’: Claiming Ground in New Netherland and the Early Modern Dutch Empire,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 73, 2 (2016): 191.

 

[12] Susan Koslow, “De Wonderlijke Perspectyfkas: An Aspect of Seventeenth Century Dutch Painting,” Oud Holland, 82, 1/2 (1967): 35.

 

[13] Steadman, 2001, 21.

 

[14] Justina Spencer, “Baroque Perspectives: Looking into Samuel van Hoogstraten's Perspective Box,” McGill University, 2008, 60.

 

[15] David Bomford, “Perspective, Anamorphosis, and Illusion: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Peep Shows,” Studies in the History of Art, 55 (1998): 127-128, 130-134.

 

[16] Thijs Weststeijn, “Between mind and body: painting the inner movements according to Samuel van Hoogstraten and Franciscus Junius,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 60 (2010): 263.

 

[17] Ibid., 266.

 

[18] Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilder-Konst anders de Zichtbaere Werelt, (Rotterdam, 1678), 75.

 

[19] Romney, 2016, 198.

 

[20]Herman Colenbrander, "A Pledge of Marital Domestic Bliss: Samuel Van Hoogstraten’s Perspective Box in the National Gallery, London," in Weststeijn Thijs, ed., The Universal Art of Samuel Van Hoogstraten (1627-1678): Painter, Writer, and Courtier (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 139-159. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wp6wc.10.

 

[21] Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips, Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective (New haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 142.

 

[22] Ibid., 197.

 

[23] Wheelock, 1973, 65.

 

[24] Ibid., 65-66.

 

[25] Wheelock, 1973, 73, visited the location of Fabritius’s View of Delft and viewed the street and canal through a “double concave lens”; he found that “the wide-angle image produced by the double concave lens is comparable to the cityscape depicted by Fabritius.”

 

[26] Walter A. Liedtke, “The ‘View of Delft’ by Carel Fabritius.” The Burlington Magazine, 118, 875 (1976): 69.

 

[27]Ibid., 69.