[...] The ‘proof of the pudding’ of his technique for automatic image analysis is a system for the automatic analysis and recognition of archaeological material such as pottery, Roman coins and glass from the Middle Ages. Van der Maaten has also successfully used the technique to distinguish forgeries and paintings by contemporaries of Van Gogh from paintings by Van Gogh himself. Two major problems alleviated. One of the challenges Van der Maaten faced was the large number of pixels, and thus the high dimensionality of image-space representations. Another major challenge was the variation of images resulting from changes in illumination, rotations or changes of scale of the object. Van der Maaten was able to alleviate these problems by testing new techniques in visualisation experiments and then extrapolating those techniques and re-testing them in a number of variants. [...]