 |
| Claude Glass |
 |
| Claude Glass |
 |
| William Gilpin |
 |
| Claude Lorrain |
Seems like a gimmick -- but I still want one...
A "Claude glass" (or black mirror) is a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, with its surface tinted a dark color. Bound up like a pocket-book or in a carrying case, Claude glasses were used by artists, travelers, and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting.
Claude glasses have the effect of abstracting the subject reflected in them from its surroundings, reducing, and simplifying the color and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a "painterly" quality.
They were famously used by picturesque artists in England in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries as a frame for drawing sketches of picturesque landscapes. The user would turn their back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror -- in a sort of pre-photographic lens -- which added the picturesque aesthetic of a subtle gradation of tones.
The Claude glass is named for Claude Lorrain, a 17th-Century landscape painter, whose name in the late 18th Century became synonymous with the picturesque aesthetic, although there is no indication he used or knew of it or anything similar. The Claude glass was supposed to help artists produce works of art similar to those of Lorrain. William Gilpin, the inventor of the picturesque ideal, advocated the use of a Claude glass saying, "they give the object of nature a soft, mellow tinge like the colouring of that Master." Gilpin mounted a mirror in his carriage, from where he could take in "a succession of high-colored pictures -- continually gliding before the eye."
No comments:
Post a Comment