Having used one of Edward Collier's letter racks as the frontispiece to my Representation and Misrepresentation, I was already aware of the intriguing nature of his trompe l'oeil paintings of printed royal speeches, newspapers, and letters, but Dror Wahrman's lavishly produced and engagingly written book takes Collier's story far further than I had imagined possible, and his story is told with a great deal of exuberant skill, careful research, and delight in a mystery.

Collier came to London in 1693 from Holland, where he had specialized in still life “vanitas” paintings. Immersing himself in the world of print that he found in England—the final lapse of the licensing act in 1695 unshackled the market for periodicals and made other forms of publishing easier—he began producing a series of illusionist paintings of letter racks containing print and ephemera such as combs, letters, and medals. Many of the paintings—sumptuously reproduced in this gorgeously produced book—were very similar in format but also subtly and playfully different. Collier delighted in creating puzzles, illusions, and deceptions in his paintings, particularly over things that seemed fixed, such as dates and spellings, while also littering his work with games, hidden meanings, and clues, particularly variants of his signatures, for those with the patience to pursue them. Fortunately, painstaking and at times brilliant detective work has been done for us by Wahrman, who makes a virtue of having used the web—the new technological revolution that echoes the print revolution that obsessed Collier—as a tool of research, enabling him to identify and then place side by side for the first time a series of images that would otherwise have remained scattered across many different art galleries and museums.

Wahrman makes good sense of much that is intriguingly and deliberately opaque. He plausibly suggests that Collier was fascinated by print's capacity to multiply variations rather than to fix a single version; that the illusive and unstable nature of print culture are reflected in the deceptions and tricks of the painter's art; that he was experimenting with serial production in art just as the newspapers he copied did so in print; that the numerous appearances of portraits of Charles I owed less to Jacobite tendencies than to the heritage of his birthplace, Breda, which had associations with both the Stuart and the Orange families; that Collier sympathized with the house painters who were falling behind the easel painters in their status; and that although something of a workmanlike producer of paintings, Collier was also skillful enough to pass his techniques on and of sufficient status to have a family connection with the Earl of Lothian, which may explain the latter's possession of some of Collier's paintings.

To be sure, there are still unresolved puzzles that Wahrman does not crack. We learn very little about who bought the pictures or where they were displayed—important because the images are, as Wahrman expertly shows, intensely autobiographical and personal (full of plays on his own name and identity, and even of miniature self-portraits), yet apparently intended for a public that seems highly unlikely to have known the intricacies of Collier's personal history, which it cost Wahrman such pains to reconstruct. Moreover, if the paintings were never displayed alongside each other in the wonderful way that Wahrman is able to achieve in the book, the connections across the images must have been almost entirely lost to contemporaries, a sort of private game that was nevertheless sold to a public consumer. Wahrman also suggests that Collier was nonpartisan, but the appearance of so many portraits of Charles I within Collier's pictures must have struck most viewers, unaware of the painter's birthplace and its significance for the Stuart cause, as at least sympathetic to the cult of Charles the Martyr that was becoming so controversial by 1700. The distinction between private and public meanings thus remains problematic. Wahrman is also on less certain ground away from Collier—the discussion of a 1709 print “Guess at My Meaning,” for example, misses several key points of its message—and as a result Collier is not placed as well in his visual or cultural context as he might have been.

Yet this remains an intriguing book about a painter who delighted in creating intrigue out of the most commonplace of objects. Wahrman enters into the spirit of his elusive quest, fancifully suggesting that he was being controlled by his subject: “I was doing Collier's bidding, puppet at the end of his string. He wanted me to figure the puzzle piece by minute piece. . . . It wasn't I who exposed Collier: it was Collier who exposed me” (80). The obsessive painter finds his obsessive historian. The result of both men's work is multilayered, self-consciously theatrical, and revelatory, playful, slightly strange, and delightful.