historyThe Public Domain Reviewc. 1670
A 17th-century Flemish painter made a canvas that looks like the back of a framed picture
Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts painted The Reverse of a Framed Painting around 1670 as a trompe l'oeil, a technique that tricks the eye into seeing a flat image as a real three-dimensional object. From a distance it looks like a painting propped on the floor with its back to the viewer, complete with a frame, a stretcher and a note pinned on. Up close the illusion breaks, because the back is the front of a canvas. The effect relies on painted shadows that must match the room's real light, so the work only fully deceives when it is placed correctly. It was probably shown among other playful illusions in a Copenhagen cabinet of curiosities around 1700.
The work anticipates modern art by making the viewer question what a painting is. Its blank reverse looks forward to abstraction, such as Malevich's Black Square, a century and a half later. Trompe l'oeil shows that painting was already exploring its own nature long before the 20th century.
background
Trompe-l'œil (French for 'deceive the eye'; tromp-LOY; French: [tʁɔ̃p lœj] ) is an artistic technique that creates a highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Trompe-l'œil, which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving painted objects or spaces as real. Forced perspective is a related illusion in architecture, and Op art is a modern style mostly dealing with geometric patterns. Trompe-l'œil has also been used as a term for analogous illusions and deceptions in literature, including those which create a frustrated interpretive expectation or mirror a character's experience through literary structure.
From Wikipedia: Trompe-l'œil (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗
Image: The Public Domain Review
