Light Touch
The Claude Lorrain Mirror
These convex, polished objects became something of a fad in the pre-photographic Romantic era.
Claude Lorrain mirror in a sharkskin case. [Science Museum, London / Wellcome Images]
In the late 1700s or early 1800s, one sometimes saw, in the picturesque countryside, a company of aesthetic tourists or amateur artists equipped with an unusual optical device. They would be looking for some ideal or beautiful image to compose and frame in their device—searching, in the words of the late-19th-century author Henry Clay Trumbull, for “a bit of lake or mountain scenery … a turn of the country road … a little wayside mill with its rustic surroundings,” to be “transfigured in that glass.”
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