Rare Antique 19th Century Custom Made Treen Handheld Claude Lorrain Style Glass Filter
- FREE UK SHIPPING WITH ALL ORDERS
- INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS PLEASE PROCEED TO CHECKOUT FOR SHIPPING QUOTES
A Rare Antique 19th Century Custom Made Handheld Treen Claude Lorrain Style Glass Filter. Beautifully Made.
From the late 18th to mid-19th century, as landscape became celebrated for its aesthetic value, artists and tourists alike used optical aids to transform scenery into something more like a picture. These devices framed, flattened, or tinted the view, turning the shifting, three-dimensional world into a manageable, painterly image.
At viewing stations, windows of stained glass in seasonal colours; green for spring, yellow for summer, orange for autumn, blue for winter, invited visitors to experience the landscape through a curated lens.
Coloured filters muted tones and altered hues, they erased differences in colour, compressed atmospheric effects, and revealed the underlying composition of a scene. What might take months of observation could be distilled into a single morning’s view. The human gaze, aided by glass, could thus control and romanticise untamed nature.
This fascination with the picturesque reached its height in the Regency period, when Claude mirrors and glasses were prized by painters, poets, and tourists. Some enthusiasts even fitted large versions into carriage windows so that passing countryside appeared softened and idealised.
A contemporary catalogue praised such glasses as “useful for producing a great variety of colours and showing their combination … for viewing eclipses, clouds, landscapes, &c.” (Benjamin Pike, Illustrated Descriptive Catalogue, New York, 1856).
Rare survivors today, they embody the Instagram of their age, being portable tools for filtering reality into something more beautiful and more composed.
Condition is good, commensurate with age and use. Structurally sound and functions well.
Measures 29.5cm x 14cm x 1cm
Weighs 134.67