Exposing Vermeer's smoke and mirrors A MILLIONAIRE engineer with no art training has spent four years creating a near-perfect copy of a 17th-century masterpiece using an optical technique he thinks the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer employed to paint the original. Tim Jenison became obsessed with the theory that Vermeer "cheated" by using mirrors and a camera obscura, a darkened box fitted with a lens that beams the inverted image of an external object on to a screen inside.