The Legacy of Willem Beurs: Bridging the Gap between Art and Material Perception

Dutch Golden Age painters could convincingly depict all sorts of materials. How did they do it and how do we perceive them as such, are questions that only recently have started to be addressed by art historians and vision scientists, respectively. This paper aims to discuss how a booklet of pictorial recipes written by the Dutch painter...

Convincing stuff: Disclosing perceptually-relevant cues for the depiction of materials in 17th century paintings

This thesis explores convincing stuff depicted in 17th century paintings, with the primary aim of understanding their visual perception. ”Stuff” is the term first introduced by Edward Adelson in 2001 to differentiate materials from objects, and to call attention on the research gap in material perception. In an interesting parallel, the...

Material properties and image cues for convincing grapes: The know-how of the 17th-century pictorial recipe by Willem Beurs

Painters mastered replicating the regularities of the visual patterns that we use to infer different materials and their properties, via meticulous observation of the way light reveals the world's textures. The convincing depiction of bunches of grapes is particularly interesting. A convincing portrayal of grapes requires a balanced...