Jane Jelley adds a unique perspective on Vermeer's techniques and style.
Johan Wagemans, University of Leuven
Featuring wonderful illustrations, engaging prose, and a deep knowledge of the craft, this is a study in art history and methodology to delight an audience beyond just visual artists.
Kirkus, Starred Review
An absolute delight. A rich and highly original ... Read moreexploration of Vermeer's life and work seen through the eyes of a practising painter.
Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe
A fascinating approach that throws up a plethora of intriguing details that add to the texture of Vermeer's life and technique... Jelley's ingenious experiment offer[s] a plausible suggestion as to how he set about his magical paintings.
Michael Prodger, Sunday Times
Sensational... revelatory and wholly convincing.
Simon Jenkins, Guardian
Magnificent.
Anna Maria Polidori, Al Femminile
In this overtly investigative yet very readable book [Jane Jelley] bequeaths the reader with an inexorable intrigue that is altogether contagious.
David Marx, David Marx Book Reviews
Along the way... Jelley infuses her descriptions of Vermeer's world with a vivid immediacy, taking readers into the hustle and bustle of market day in Delft... It quickly becomes an immersive reading experience, like an excellent historical novel with 62 pages of fine-type end notes attached to help with further inquiries.
Simon Donoghue, Christian Science
Fascinating. Jelley brings a vast knowledge, and, more importantly, practice, of traditional painting techniques... she proposes a novel suggestion as to how exactly Vermeer could have used a camera obscura... A boon to both scholars and casual art appreciators.
Politics and Prose, Washington DC
The appeal of Jelley's elegant book is the product of her literary style and the abundant reproductions of Vermeer's work and that of his contemporaries. Jelley's volume is a work of art in itself.
New York Journal of Books
The exquisitely luminous paintings of Johannes Vermeer have long stirred debate over whether the seventeenth-century Dutch master used optical aids. Artist Jane Jelley probed the issue pragmatically.
Barbara Kiser, Nature
Well-researched... vivid... fascinating.
Lynn Roberts, Tablet
This is not another speculative Vermeer biography, a fill-in-the-gaps, guesswork life. This is Vermeer the painter, by a painter.... Jelley's meticulous approach yields fascinating insights.
Laura Freeman, Literary Review
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