A History of Seeing: In Eleven Inventions - Softcover

For two centuries after the invention of the telescope, interest in observing and chronicling the workings of nature continued to rise. Scholarly endeavours placed observation and direct experience at the forefront of knowledge and ideas. Sir Isaac Newton’s insights in the late 1600s showed that the natural world was not guided by invisible, animate and sacred spirits, but was rather a giant, quasi-mechanical system governed by a series of rules and laws that could only be understood – and indeed were slowly being revealed – by keen observation and methodical experimentation. Philosophers such as Descartes and Locke had overturned the classical view that certain innate truths exist. Knowledge was not innate, the newly modern scientists believed, but must be acquired by direct experience and sensory perception. I see, therefore I know.

Intrinsic to the need to experience and observe was travel, and this took place on a grand scale during this period. The great new colonial powers sent fleets of ships around the world’s oceans in pursuit of trade, and overland expeditions into the interiors of the Indian sub-continent and Africa. Newly independent Americans were exploring and surveying the continent, pushing ever further west against considerable – but ultimately unsuccessful – indigenous resistance. In Europe, wealthy and aristocratic young men – and, sometimes, women – routinely embarked on the Grand Tour, a lavish precursor to the modern gap year…

All this observing drove a requirement to record what was seen. The options available were sketching, drawing and painting, and topographical, scientific and botanical illustration were popular career paths for artists at this time…

Rigorous depiction was all very well if one were a talented draftsman, but not all travellers were so gifted. Scholars and amateur enthusiasts – as well as artists – turned to the camera obscura to help them capture accurate representations of landscapes and objects. Just to remind you, the camera obscura is a natural optical phenomenon whereby the image of a brightly lit scene can be projected through a small hole onto a surface in a darkened space.

In 1806 an Englishman called William Hyde Wollaston, despairing at his lack of ability to capture the grandeur of the Lake District on paper, patented a new optical drawing aid he called the camera lucida. This was an elegantly simple and highly portable device that used a small prism suspended on a stand to reflect the image being observed in such a way that it appeared to float over the paper like a ghost, allowing the user to trace the subject in as much detail as they chose. It quickly became the preferred instrument to aid observational drawing and was used by artists and amateurs all around the world for the first half of the nineteenth century.

Around the same time as Wollaston launched his device, the art world was experiencing a quiet revolution. With some notable exceptions, landscape painting had until now been seen as the poor relation of art, the precinct of jobbing topographers recording monuments for the tourist trade and country seats for the vanity of provincial squires. A Suffolk countryman called John Constable (1776–1837) and his Londoner contemporary J.M.W.Turner (1755–1851) changed that view and, in the process, paved the way for more radical artistic changes in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both artists approached nature in all its forms – embracing such mundane details as ‘willows, old rotten banks, slimy posts’ as well as the more dramatic atmospheric effects of light and weather – as a subject worthy of their full attention. This was a departure from traditional landscapes, where it was typically man’s interventions in nature that took centre stage. Constable and Turner used pioneering techniques of colour, brushwork and composition to represent nature as they saw it instead of as the artistic academies deemed it. They painted with the eye rather than the mind. 

In manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution was well under way, and more and more traditional tasks and trades were being industrialised and automated by the new machines. Could the artist’s craft go the same way? 

The currents of scientific, artistic, industrial and social change were mixing and converging. The zeitgeist was slowly forming an idea that hung in the atmosphere like the fragmentary memory of a dream: could an image be taken directly from life and captured, frozen and fixed forever? 

On the afternoon of 19 August 1839, more than 200 people waited in the courtyard in front of the imposing pillared entrance to the Institut de France, on the left bank of the Seine facing the Pont des Arts and the Louvre. The crowd was the overflow that had accumulated since the last...