Black-and-white floor tiles at his feet, brass chandelier overhead, work table at his left, an artist in 17th-century pantaloons sits at his easel with his back to us, a beret cocked smartly on his head, a brush lightly grasped in his right hand. His model, her satiny blue robe aglow in the angled light, stands in front of the large creased map hanging on the wall.
It could only be Vermeer’s 1666 masterpiece, “The Art of Painting”—but it is not. The celebrated image has been shrunken and rendered in three dimensions by Richard Haas, who is better-known for painting outsize outdoor murals on the sides of buildings than for dollhouse-like miniatures. But he has been making small, compelling dioramas like this one since the 1960s, using photographs to re-create in cardboard and paper the studios of artists like Picasso and Giacometti, or just looking out his windows to duplicate the streetscapes of his Manhattan neighborhood, complete with tiny traffic lights and pedestrians.
