We’ve long been romanticized by the concept of the divine artist, blessed with otherworldly talent. "Tim’s Vermeer" isn’t any less in awe of great masters like Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. It just proves masterworks take more than pixie dust: They take hard work.
The film chronicles the unlikely discovery of a Texas inventor, Tim Jenison, who believes he’s found the key to how the 17th-century artist painted with such photorealistic detail 150 years before the daguerreotype. Conspiracy theories have abounded, many of them focusing on his possible use of camera obscura (a device that projects an image on a wall or screen).
Jenison’s belief is that some of Vermeer’s most famous paintings (he left behind 34) were done not just with a camera obscura-like contraption, but with a mirror that enabled him to exactly copy the images reflected. By creating a rough approximate of this, Jenison (who had never painted before in his life) finds he can draw brilliantly detailed paintings.
He sets out to prove his theory by exactly reproducing Vermeer’s "The Music Lesson," recreating the precise conditions Vermeer painted in. Jenison turns a San Antonio warehouse into a replica of Vermeer’s studio, right down to period-accurate lenses, paint dyes and costumes. It took nearly a year to build the studio, and four more to paint his Vermeer.
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