Which painting is the real Vermeer, and which one is someone’s first attempt at an oil painting? Take a good, long look and keep your guess in your head.
You will find the answer at the end of this article.
After a visit to London’s National Gallery, I was fascinated by a work by Johannes Vermeer, titled Lady Standing at a Virginal. Exquisite attention to detail yielded a seemingly photographic quality that was nothing short of breathtaking.
After nearly half an hour standing face to face with this 17th-century painting, I found myself in awe of what truly was a masterpiece. When I returned to my flat later that afternoon, my curiosity got the better of me and I immediately turned to Google for a background check. A remarkable painter, Vermeer’s high level of detail and quality was unmatched in the 17th century. Here is one of Vermeer’s most incredible works, The Astronomer.
After a few more clicks I found myself on a fairly recent 2013 documentary titled “Tim’s Vermeer” about renowned inventor Tim Jenison’s quest to recreate the mysteriously photographic qualities of a Vermeer in order to test a hypothesis about Vermeer’s technique. 1 hour and 20 minutes later, I sat reflecting on what was both an eye-opening and astonishing film of Jenison’s effort to paint one of Vermeer’s most incredibly-detailed pieces, The Music Lesson. A one-sentence synopsis: Jenison used mirrors to enable him to paint at the highest level of detail, matching colors from the real painting to his canvas as he nearly perfectly recreated the work of one of history’s greatest masters.The film is available on YouTube for $3 (or just be resourceful with Google) if you’d like to check it out here.
For me, reflecting on this film is where things started to click. Truthfully, this article is a book review on one of my favorite books in the last year. Well, this is more of an application and recognition of the book’s genius, and its relation to Tim Jenison’s striking documentary.
Robert Greene’s 2012 book, Mastery, chronicles the lives of history’s greatest masters, from da Vinci to Darwin to Paul Graham, among many others. Greene discovers patterns in the lives of these famous individuals and relays them to readers in a formulaic manner.
Greene’s Mastery allowed me to contextualize how Jenison was able to reconstruct a Vermeer as his first painting in the broader context of the pursuit of mastery. While many different connections exist between Mastery and Tim’s Vermeer, I want to focus on onespecific parallel: submitting to reality. Greene documents this step as “the ideal apprenticeship”, focusing on deep observation and skill acquisition. First and foremost, deep observation is a self-less and wholely immersive task. For Jenison, it was the complete devotion to studying and understanding Vermeer and his work. It was hundreds of hours of observing and analyzing paintings with the simple goal of learning. For many of us, as Greene documents, this is a challenge. It requires forgoing the need for attention or recognition.
Secondly, Greene details skill acquisition and experimentation. Focus on one specific skill – as Jenison focused on painting in a mirror – and practice, practice practice. Jenison practiced for hours on end using the mirror technique, experimenting, learning and iterating quickly as he identified what worked well using the technique. This is extremely tedious and challenges us to surpass the boredom and pain of not enjoying a satisfactory “success” that may short-circuit the entire process.
As Greene warns, there are many challenges that people today tend to confront within this practice of submitting to reality. First, value learning over money. Jenison’s intentions centered around a pure devotion to learning more about Vermeer and how he was able to make such incredible paintings. Some of the best career experiences come from having this learning mindset (which is why I recommend interning/working in a startup or a non-profit). Second, as Joel Embiid would say, trust the process. Too many of us seek immediate gratification. It would have been easy for Jenison to drop the idea and give up; he spent nearly 1400 days doing this (watch yourself before you complain). Yet he understood that mastery takes time, and in the end, it paid off.
In fact, so many parallels exist between the documentary and the book that it is hard to stop here. But if you are truly dedicated to pursuing mastery, then maybe you should submit to reality and check out the book yourself.
So, the moment you have been waiting for (or perhaps skipped the entire article to see?).
Painting on the left: Tim Jenison. Painting on the right: Johannes Vermeer (~$30 Million Value).
