Your review of the “Snapshot” show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which explores the nexus between painting and photography, does not mention that many a painter included would be most embarrassed to see the show (“Point and Paint,” November 26, 2011). Although you say that the likes of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century French painters, never intended their photographs to go on public display, they would actually be mortified to see them next to their paintings. Bonnard, whom you quote as writing that he took “notes” of his subjects before going home to reflect and dream in preparation for painting them, never mentioned a camera. Striving after likeness for centuries, painters embraced every mechanical gadget that could help them render their subjects as realistically as possible since the Fifteenth Century. They kept them in secret, though. The advent of primitive photography only increased their zeal. Johannes Vermeer, a Seventeenth Century Dutch painter, was long suspected of using a camera obscura to produce his paintings, but he kept mum about it. Likeness was the prize, but tricks were just tricks. Only well into the Twentieth Century is photography accepted as an art form in its own right, and painting from photographs turns into an irrelevance. Tricks or no tricks, likeness is passé by then.