A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DSamuel Thomas van Hoogstraten : 1627 - 1678
Dutch painter and writer on art (b. 1627, Dordrecht, d. 1678, Dordrecht). He painted genre scenes in the style of de Hooch and Metsu, and portraits. but he is best known as a specialist in perspective effects. One of his perspective boxes which shows a painted toy world through a peep-hole, is in the National Gallery, London. Only in his early works can it be detected that he was a pupil of Rembrandt.
 Still-life. 1666-68. Oil on canvas, 63 x 79 cm Samuel T. van Hoogstraten, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe A larger version may be downloaded Image Source: http://sunserv.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/h/hoogstra/index.html
Samuel van Hoogstraten travelled to London, Vienna, and Rome, worked in Amsterdam and The Hague as well as his native Dordrecht, and was a man of many parts. He was an etcher, poet, director of the mint at Dordrecht, and art theorist. His Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (Introduction to the Art of Painting, 1678) contains one of the rare contemporary appraisals of Rembrandt's work.
Samuel van Hoogstraten, born in 1627, was a pupil of Rembrandt. Van Hoogstraten's writings were a primary source of Rembrant's school. Along with the accounts, van Hoogstraten also included many criticisms of Rembrandt's paintings. He also studied under another pupil of Rembrandt, Carel Fabritius. Fabritius experimented with convex mirrors in paintings. Van Hoogstraten, a trompe l'oeil artist, created a series of peepshow boxes. These incredible boxes were extremely popular during his time.
 Samuel T. (Thomas) van Hoogstraten, c.1665 Source: http://library.advanced.org/3257/illusion.html#peep
Trompe l'Oeil A French phrase which means "fools the eye" or "deceives the eye". It was also a school of painting in the late 1600's in Holland. These artists continued to experiment with Leonardo da Vinci's principles and made paintings which were meant to be viewed from different angles or through holes in constructed boxes.
Brunelleschi's Peepshow
 Brunelleschi's Peepshow Source: http://library.advanced.org/3257/illusion.html#peep
Filippo Brunelleschi used his training as a gold smith to apply a silver background on a painted panel, allowing the color of the sky and passing clouds to become part of the painting as seen by the viewer. This was an attempt at a perspective painting and interactive art. The panel was constructed with a hole at the vanishing point. The reflection of the image was viewed in a mirror through the hole, giving an illusion of depth.
van Hoogstraten's 'Perspective' or 'Peep Show' Boxes Samuel van Hoogstraten, expanded upon Brunelleschi's concept (see above) and created a series of peep show boxes. The boxes were constructed of wood with one side missing to allow light to enter. Small holes were made to view the panels. "Real space" equaled "painted space" because the viewer's line of sight was limited and opposite the vanishing point. Images were distorted on different panels to maintain the illusion of depth.
also... A Peep Show Box is a box with a painted interior which, when seen through a small "peephole," seems to become a "real", three-dimensional scene. The world of Samuel van Hoogstraten's peep show is created through a masterly manipulation of simple central perspective and its distorted or anamorphic form. His interior is viewed through two peepholes, which exactly control how spectators interpret what they see. It is difficult to give instructions for making a peep show, as success depends less on technical competence than artistic abilities and imagination. In this device the illusion is not one of movement but of space, achieved by special lighting effects on flat scenery in a box and control of these can only be gained by experimentation rather than instruction. Quite apart from any other consideration, artifacts of this sort are so personal to the individual creating them that it is impossible to give step-by-step directions.
 Samuel van Hoogstraten's, Peep Show Box, c.1660 Source: Collection of The National Gallery, London
The box displays two separate views (coinciding with the view with each peephole) of the interior of a Dutch house. The three-dimensional illusion is created from five panels painted with perspective scenes. The sixth side of the box is open, to let light in. This light source is incorporated into the design of the interior; the opening is imagined as a shuttered window, filtering bright pools of sunlight into the rooms.
 Samuel van Hoogstraten's, Peep Show Box, c.1660 Source: Collection of The National Gallery, London
Source: http://www.divamedia.com/sammy.html
Samuel van Hoogstraten is familiar to scholars of Dutch art as a talented pupil and early critic of Rembrandt, and as the author of a major Dutch painting treatise. In this book, Celeste Brusati looks at the art, writing, and career of this multi-faceted artist. Analyzing van Hoogstraten's painting treatise, illusionistic pictures, ingenious perspective boxes, and witty trompe-l'oeil images, Brusati reveals the crucial role these endeavors played in the forging of van Hoogstraten's professional and social identity. Brusati looks at the historical circumstances of van Hoogstraten's career, which he fashioned from a convergence of Dutch cultural practices, family genealogy, and his considerable entrepreneurial acumen. She shows how Van Hoogstraten exploited the court patronage system to secure the worth of his work in the newer market culture of the Dutch Republic. Brusati explores Van Hoogstraten's use of illusionistic artifice in his art and writing to shed new light on the much-disputed nature of Dutch "realism", and she discusses how a notion of "experimental artistry", which linked representational craft to the production of knowledge, informed Van Hoogstraten's many projects and framed the terms within which he and his colleagues understood artistic achievement during this period. Brusati, Celeste Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1995 xxviii, 400 p. 6-1/4 x 9-1/2 16 color plates, 158 halftones, Cloth ISBN: 0-226-07785-3 Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Another cluster of talented pupils worked with Rembrandt around 1640: Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-74) from Amsterdam; Carel Fabritius (1622-54), later a leading painter in Delft; and Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-78) of Dordrecht, later better known for his art theory, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (1678; "Introduction to the High School of Painting"). Each of these made his own variation on the theme of the master [ Rembrandt ], by adding colour to the history groups (van den Eeckhout), by working with a lighter background and experimenting with perspective effects (Fabritius), and by producing illusionistic experiments (van Hoogstraten).
also... Carel Fabritius (1622 - 1654) Carel Fabritius, (baptized Feb. 27, 1622, Middenbeemster, Neth. d. Oct. 12, 1654, Delft), Dutch Baroque painter of portraits, genre, and narrative subjects whose concern with light and space influenced the stylistic development of the mid-17th-century school of Delft. He was the son of a schoolmaster, who is said to have been a part-time painter, and both Carel and his brother Barent became painters; both took the name Fabritius from their original trade of carpentry (Latin faber, "carpenter"). In the early 1640s Carel Fabritius studied under Rembrandt and became one of his most significant and successful pupils. From about 1650 onward he worked in Delft and in 1652 entered the painters' guild there. He died of injuries received when the Delft powder magazine exploded; the same explosion is thought to have destroyed many of his paintings. The earliest work definitely attributed to Fabritius, "Raising of Lazarus" (National Museum, Warsaw), is still very much in the manner of Rembrandt. But by 1648, when the portrait of Abraham de Potter (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) was painted, his originality and independence of spirit had already asserted itself. Unlike Rembrandt, whose figures characteristically emerge from a dark background and are modelled by the action of light, Fabritius silhouetted his figures against light backgrounds and specialized in depicting the subtlety of daylight effects; in this he influenced both Pieter de Hooch and Jan Vermeer (who is thought to have been his pupil).
 Carel Fabritius, View in Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall, 1652 Source: Collection of The National Gallery, London
Fabritius seems to have first established a reputation for painting mural decorations with illusionistic perspective effects; "View in Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall" (1652; National Gallery, London) may possibly reflect this type of work, for it is thought to once have been part of a peep show or a perspective box. "The Goldfinch" of 1654 (Mauritshuis, The Hague) is one of his best known works and a unique composition in the tradition of 17th-century Dutch painting. An early portrait in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, and a late portrait, from 1654, in the National Gallery, London, usually are regarded as self-portraits.
You can read more about 'perspective boxes' in the matching essay Peep Shows and Toy Theatre
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