Peepshow

I went to London over the weekend and it was great fun! I visited good friends, had a lovely tea, went to the Brick Lane market and haggled (in English!), saw some exhibitions, ate a lot of Indian food, and went to a gargantuan Topshop.

On Monday, I was wandering through the rooms in the National Gallery when I happened upon Samuel van Hoogstraten's "A Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House." It was remarkable. I tried to write out a description but it was inadequate so I'm borrowing the description off of the National Gallery's website.

"The peepshow is a rectangular box; the interior is painted on three sides, as well as on the top and bottom. The sixth side is open; originally light would have entered the box from this side, perhaps through specially treated paper stretched across it. The box would have been placed close to a window or illumination provided by a candle. There are peep-holes in the two shorter sides which provide the illusion of three-dimensional views of the interior of a house...The box was probably painted in Dordrecht in the later 1650s. A number of such peepshows were made in Holland but only a few examples have survived." (http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk)


I really enjoyed the process of looking into the box because as I adjusted my eye to the peephole I could observe the different painted objects slowly come into focus and reaching perfect perspective. That's what was so cool about it, really. Even though the proportions within the box were determined, I couldn't realize them until my sight was able to perceive the snapshot. It was as if my eyes were acting as a camera lens. (The inside was lovely too, of course.) A great essay with related subject matter is Rosalind Krauss' "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," which I read last week when I failed to stay focused in my three hour French literature section. Womp. You can find it in the Winter 1982 issue of Art Journal.