On our trip to the Lake District last year, we parked the car and climbed to Claife Viewing Station before setting out on our walk to Beatrix Potter’s house. Built in 1790, Claife provides a beautiful viewpoint over Lake Windermere. Just outside the viewing station, there was a display explaining the Picturesque Movement, which developed in the late 1700s as part of the Romantic movement during the Enlightenment. It described how the viewing station’s open windows had been designed so that you could literally frame your view of the lake. In the olden days, of course, this would have been for painting or sketching the scenery. Or simply viewing it.

Before this, the accepted aesthetics of beauty had been about symmetry and proportion. It is hard to believe today, but the landscape of the Lake District was thought to be an unattractive wilderness. A visitor in 1698 complained that its “rocky barren hills…appear very terrible”. The Picturesque movement changed that. Instead, aesthetic appreciation became all about instinct and emotional response, the sublime and the beautiful. People began to look at landscapes as though they were paintings (which is why they sometimes looked at them through frames). Some views were thought to be so spectacular that they might make visitors faint or swoon! And people didn’t just use viewing stations to admire the landscape. Some used a small tinted mirror called a Claude glass, a kind of compact mirror that helped them frame the view just like a painting. It sounds ridiculous now, turning your back to the landscape to admire its reflection, but the idea was to soften its impact, in case it proved to be too overwhelming. Using these framing devices was part of the experience.

Standing there with my camera, I found myself thinking about how these ideas still shape the way we look at landscapes. The way we pause at a view, notice the layers, and instinctively frame it, feels very much in the spirit of the picturesque. Even without meaning to, we’re still looking for that balance of beauty and roughness that Gilpin wrote about in Prints (1768), when he defined picturesque as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture.” Of course it was rather convenient too, as Europe was war-torn, so people began looking closer to home for beauty and inspiration rather than embarking on the traditional Grand Tour of Europe. But I digress.

There’s something about that idea that stayed with me when I was with my camera, walking through and along the landscapes. The viewfinder became its own kind of Claude glass, a way of framing and understanding what was in front of me, searching for balance in the irregular, light in the texture, and emotion in the ordinary. That day in the Lakes, I realised I was still doing exactly what those early travellers did; chasing beauty, only now through a lens instead of a mirror.

kirstin