Turn From the View

For roughly a century, an English person of taste travelling to see a beautiful landscape carried a device that required them to turn round and face the other way.

The Claude glass was a small mirror, about the size of a pocket watch or a little larger, slightly convex, backed in black or dark brown, and kept in a hinged case like a spectacle case. You stood in front of a view, turned your back on it, held the glass up, and looked at the reflection.

What it did

Three things, all of them deliberate.

The convexity pulled a wide landscape into a small compass, so that a whole valley fitted inside a hand-sized oval. The tint suppressed colour and flattened everything into a narrow tonal range of browns and golds. And the frame of the mirror cropped the scene, so that what you saw had edges.

The result was a landscape that looked like a painting — specifically like a Claude Lorrain, which is where the name comes from. The seventeenth-century Frenchman’s golden, tonally unified, carefully composed landscapes were the standard of beauty for the English eighteenth century, and the glass reproduced them on demand out of whatever was behind you.

The industry around it

This was not a private eccentricity. It was equipment for an organised activity.

The Picturesque tour was a well-developed form of English travel by the 1770s, with guidebooks, recommended routes and a technical vocabulary. William Gilpin wrote the theory. Thomas West’s Guide to the Lakes of 1778 went further and identified stations — numbered, specified viewpoints, at which the tourist should stand, in which direction they should look, and what they would see.

At the station, you got the glass out.

So a person had travelled several days to reach a place, and then arrived at a designated spot, and then turned away from the actual mountain in order to see a small dim reflection of it that resembled a painting they had seen at home.

The easy response is to laugh, and Wordsworth and various others were laughing at it within a generation, and the Romantic reaction that followed was in large part a reaction against exactly this — against composed, framed, tastefully mediated nature, and in favour of standing in front of the thing itself and being overwhelmed.

These people were entirely aware that seeing is a learned skill and that beauty is a convention. They were not confused about the difference between the mountain and the picture. They preferred the picture, and said so, and had a tool for producing it.

What the Claude glass did — crop, reduce, warm the tone, flatten the range, make the world resemble an existing genre of image — now happens automatically, on a phone, at the station, while the person stands with their back to the view.