Lee F. Mindel takes a close-up tour of Jeremiah Goodman's luminous paintings of interior design and architecture

Eight years ago, I placed a phone call I’d been wanting to make for decades. The recipient was Jeremiah Goodman, the legendary artist whose paintings of interiors have graced magazines and design books since the 1940s. Goodman has been a sought-after portrait painter of high-society homes and the secret weapon of generations of top architects and decorators, who have found that a few of his tempera brushstrokes can capture the essence of their proposals and finished designs in a way that renderings and photographs simply cannot.

I was hoping Goodman would agree to paint some of our firm’s proposed projects so we, as architects, and our clients could envision designs that were at that point merely lines on paper. We made an appointment, and a colleague and I went to his New York studio armed with notebooks we’d prepared of his paintings, broken down by decade. Despite the fact we were, in theory, going to interview him for the job, it felt like we were the ones being auditioned. Goodman has a unique ability to communicate ideas and atmosphere through abstraction—his broad dabs of paint produce an almost reverse-pixelization effect similar to that of the convex mirrors hovering above Vermeer’s compositions.

Surprisingly, Goodman knew of our firm and asked what taken us so long to approach him. We spent hours discussing the fascinating range of projects he had painted, and he was both eloquent in his descriptions of designs and warm and very funny in his reminiscences about famous clients.

We’ve worked together many times since that call and have become close friends in the process. Seen from afar, his romantic compositions offer a cohesive whole, yet the secret to his genius is particularly visible when viewed up close.

Please join me for a close-up examination of the brilliant brushstrokes of Jeremiah Goodman.