# The Camera Obscura [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [LOO, Charles-Amédée-Philippe van]() - Date: 1751-1800 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 89 x 89 cm ## Commentary The two paintings, The Camera Obscura and Soap Bubbles, were painted for the Prussian imperial family in Berlin. In both paintings, three children appear in a trompe-l'oeil oval window in a painted stone wall. Each figure appears at a different height, but the three are tightly clustered to form a pyramidal composition. With rapt attention that connects them psychologically, the children observe their toys or games. Amédée drew upon a variety of sources for his paintings of Children's pastimes. From the seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters like Caspar Netscher and Gerrit Dou, popular with eighteenth-century French collectors and engravers, he took both the <a onclick="return OpenOther\('/html/n/netscher/blowing.html'\)" href="/html/n/netscher/blowing.html">subject of a boy blowing bubbles</a> and the <a onclick="return OpenOther\('/html/d/dou/2/violonpl.html'\)" href="/html/d/dou/2/violonpl.html">structure of the fictive window</a> through which we see him. ## Related artworks - [Soap Bubbles]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()