The Claude Glass

#49—Wordsworth, fast fads and a reflection on reflections.

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your fortnightly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

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A strange little craze took form in England around the time the poet William Wordsworth was born in 1770. I say strange because, well, fads and crazes do appear quite bizarre to those looking at them from afar, but as humans are quite prolific at doing odd things, perhaps it wasn’t strange after all.

And while this craze may appear strange and little, harmless really, it is entirely reasonable to ask, would Wordsworth be the famed Romantic poet of the Picturesque he is today without it? He was after all, born in Cockermouth on the western edge of the Lake District—"a place of savage and uncouth inhabitants", the poet Michael Drayton had said of it, far from Romantic or Picturesque. The Lake District was wild, unwelcoming, and frightfully barren, a terrible place that no traveller ought to visit, so they once said. But around the time Wordsworth was born, a curious thing occurred. Travellers descended on this frightful district in droves, crowding hillsides in predetermined locations to find the best spot, perhaps in their own chair, before turning their backs on the very splendour they had come to see. Then, holding a small object of about 4 inches before their eyes, they would stare into it for quite some time.

No, these generally wealthy and educated travellers weren’t 18th Century Instagrammers, although the analogy is tempting. They were doing something rather different: they were admiring the view through a Claude glass—a pocket-sized plano-convex mirror (curved on the outside and flat at the back) that was darkly tinted in black or grey, or for the truly devoted, violet.

The mirrors miniaturised the landscape, softened its colours, flattened its tones, and transformed its aesthetics into something resembling a landscape painted by Claude Lorrain. It was like a paint by numbers for amateur artists, framing for them what they could not see with their own eyes, although many just enjoyed joining in the spectacle. Claude himself, who had nothing to do with mirrors, would have surely been bemused by the whole thing, but having lived a good century before, died with no inkling of the craze to come.

And it wasn’t by pure chance that these travellers were converging on little Wordsworth’s Lake District with a sudden love of the wildly sublime natural world (shrunk down to size). They had been tempted there.

The Claude Sunglasses, by Alia Parker

Those of us who remember the WBI (World Before Internet) may recall such things as the Lonely Planet or Frommer’s travel guides. Granted, they still exist, although solely for those of us that still like WBI things. Well, in the late 1700s, a number of travel guides written by the likes of Thomas West, Thomas Gray and William Gilpin (who wrote the rules of the Picturesque movement), took a particular interest in the landscapes of the Lake District and all three championed the use of a Claude glass. West’s book, A Guide to the Lakes, in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, named the exact locations in which to stand with your Claude glass, further enticing the reader with Picturesque illustrations of the views they were to turn their backs upon. And into this world walked Wordsworth at precisely the right moment, shaping with words what others needed a Claude glass to see.

Wordsworth would have surely been familiar with the Claude glass, although there’s no reference to him being a devotee to the device. Nevertheless, mirror imagery infiltrates his verse, sprinkling it with watery reflections which harmoniously mirror the reflections of the mind, and in these reflections in pools, tarns, and lakes, he is guided in the tradition of the Picturesque—a Romantic-era aesthetic philosophy that mediated the divide between Beauty and the Sublime.¹

A short distance up the fire track from my home is the ghostly trunk of a long-dead eucalypt. It fell recently in the ferocious winds whipping these parts and in its last desperate act, crushed the barbed-wire fence below, splaying its skeletal fingerbones into the paddock to point at the far hills. Sitting on its white insect-eaten trunk, I turn my back to these Picturesque hills and instead hold my sunglasses with their reflective convex lenses in front of me. It’s a poor excuse for a Claude glass but given they went out of fashion over 200 years ago, they’re rather hard to come by. The image is skewed without a plano backing, but it adds an abstract quality to the picture that is more interesting that the muted tones of the mountains in its distance. I stare at the small landscape and feel nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s taken me no time at all to be bored of it. So I turn around and the world moves before me. The mountains in the distance roll in layers of blue, then green, grey and back to blue. A row of trees stands over the curve of the first hill; their leaves quiver in the breeze screened in the foreground by a wall of air rippling in the summer heat, and seeing the two together, they appear like a hologram that if you were tempted to walk into it, would transport you into another dimension, and what could possibly lie there?

Strange it is that the throngs would choose to miss out on such a sight by muting it with a Claude glass. I reflect on this, and on why it is that we use the word reflection to describe thoughts as if they are a mirror of our mind rather than of the mind itself, and then when the sun begins to cook the hypodermis layer of my skin in the way an oven bakes a frittata, I retreat and return to you here at my keyboard.

By the end of his life, Wordsworth had emancipated himself from the aesthetic rules of the Picturesque. He alluded to this evolution in his magnum opus The Prelude (although in an earlier 1805 edition to what is mostly shared). He had wronged nature by relegating it to the realms of lesser reason, trapping it within an aesthetic.² Here, Wordsworth described such a view as being:

        "rules of mimic art transferr'd
To things above all art"

By this time, the Picturesque had grown comically cliched. Yet, there is no reason Wordsworth should have hung his head and cringed. There was genius to his work that revealed more depth and ingenuity to his creations than the Picturesque alone. And through his words, and the eyes of the travellers with guide books and their Claude glasses, a whole new appreciation was born for an area of stunning beauty that had been feared and ignored, a place that now attracts more than 18 million visitors a year, a landscape that, to be fair to proponents of the Picturesque, is very aesthetically pleasing—the Lake District. A place that Wordsworth described, not through the muted vision of a Claude glass, but with his own eyes, and most importantly, his heart.

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Etymology Monday

Can you guess the origins of this word? There’s a clue in its first few letters.

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1. Stephen J. Spector, Wordsworth's Mirror Imagery and the Picturesque Tradition, ELH, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring, 1977), The Johns Hopkins University Press (p. 91).

2. Stephen J. Spector, Wordsworth's Mirror Imagery and the Picturesque Tradition, ELH, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring, 1977), The Johns Hopkins University Press (pp. 93-94).