using a Claude mirror for portraiture

Seeking for some mirror images of myself that might be more interesting to paint from than just a conventional stare into a conventional mirror, I thought I'd explore the once ubiquitous Claude Mirror as used by landscape artists some centuries ago. Indeed, John Glover, the great Tasmanian colonial painter, often carried a ‘Claude Glass’ to assist in his `aesthetic response’ when landscape painting in 'Tassie'. ( John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque , Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery,  p. 11) .

You can see some nice images of Claude Glasses (Dark Mirrors)  here  that have been collected together by Thomas Greenslade, Jr. of Kenyon College from the Smithsonian.

Alex McKay and Suzanne Matheson have done some fascinating work with the Claude Mirror and you can see the fruits of their investigations here. Their project is not purely concerned with the mirror itself, but more broadly with with contemporary art in a way that engages with and critiques its historical predecessors, especially perception and representation of landscape in painting. I was particularly captivated by their description of the device:

"The Claude mirror, a landscape-viewing device, is a pre-photographic optical instrument that was widely used in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its popularity is closely linked to the rise of the Picturesque Movement. It was named after its ability to transform a landscape view into something reminiscent of a painting by 17th-century French artist Claude Lorraine. These small, black, convex mirrors, usually sized for the hand, were extensively used by artists and tourists to contemplate, reconfigure and record landscape. They were wielded on picturesque tours of Britain, the Continent and North America. In areas such as the Wye Valley or the Lake District, tourists would halt at proscribed Viewing Stations (maps and mirrors available at opticians, stationers, art suppliers and, later in the period, tourist stops), turn their backs to the scene, hold up a Claude mirror, and look at the framed and transformed view. The distorted perspective, altered colour saturation and compressed tonal values of the reflection resulted in a loss of detail (especially in the shadows), but an overall unification of form and line. The Claude mirror essentially edited a natural scene, making its scale and diversity manageable, throwing its picturesque qualities into relief and - crucially - making it much easier to draw and record.

The seeming absurdity of refracting and reflecting nature in this fashion is balanced by the beauty and seductiveness of the mirror’s optical effects. It is an 18th century ‘virtual reality ‘ device, having all of the charm and magic of the camera obscura, but none of the clumsiness. History has remembered the contradictions of the device, but lost the experience of its power and utility. The popularity of the Claude mirror over 200 years ago is acknowledged by historians, but the very characteristics that once made it so popular have been misrepresented or misunderstood." http://www.tinternabbeyhotel.co.uk/claude-mirror/


My revisiting of the device however is for portraiture, not landscape. Used close up to my face, would it's distortions loosen any perceptual shackles? I managed to find a convex mirror that would serve me as a Claude Glass. I’m hoping the looming gargoyles, combined with expressive mark-making, will produce energetic, strong images that yet have something truthful to say. The beauty of self-portraiture is that one can be as brutal as one likes. There was a reason John Singer Sargent once said, "Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend."

Unfortunately I have yet not been able to get my hands on Arnaud Maillet's The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art as yet.

Anyway, the first Claudified images are in ... and some food for thought:

"One of the key attractions at the oceanside boardwalk or the midway at the county fair used to be the fun house mirrors. An ordinary person could walk up to the mirror and see themselves reflected with an uncharacteristically wide middle, short or stretched legs, or a giraffe neck. The mirrors were always good for a laugh ...

Sometimes, though our self-image is just as distorted. We look in the bathroom mirror and see something different from the image the outside world sees. The old gender-based joke shows a man sucking in his paunch and envisioning his 18-year-old football player self and the woman stands beside him, scowling at the perceived elephantine size of her butt. It's internal, but the distortion in the mirror is no less real in the eye of the subject.

Here's the rub: we act in accordance with the view we see, not the actual view, but our own fun house version of it".  (Julie Poland).

The portraits i ended up painting using these photo images can be seen here.

Sylvia Plath, Satre, and trouble with mirrors

Mirror
Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

“There is a white hole in the wall, a mirror. It is a trap. I know I am going to let myself be caught in it. I have. The grey things appears in the mirror. I go over and look at it, I can no longer get away. It is the reflection of my face.” Jean-Paul Satre, 1938.

Well, Jean-Paul, I'm left wondering if the advent of the common mirror, readily available, easily affordable, infesting all our domestic corners and public spaces, was a necessary pre-condition for the birth of existentialist philosophies.
Or the birth of Western individualism.
More to the point, was the bathroom mirror a necessary pre-requisite for the self-portraiture of Angst ?
A pre-requisite not because an already angst-ridden artist could now sketch from his crystal mirror image, but because the birth of the industrial-manufactured mirror became a determining factor in the very birth of the modern pervading sense of Angst. The material culture's artefact 'mirror' so conditioned the cultural milieu that society could now comprehend, connect with, and value the cultural artefact 'portrait', expressive of the state of Angst.
Enter the two Freuds.

mirrors and self-portraiture

The advent of the mirror has historically been central to the development of self-portraiture - perhaps even to the very emergence of our modern sense of self and cult of individualism.

"While the modern mirror dates from the mid-sixteenth century, when the Venetians of Murano compressed a layer of mercury between a sheet of glass and a sheet of metal, allowing for perfect, distortion-free reflections, few people had access to one. The new mirrors slowly replaced the much inferior bronze, pewter, silver and gold varieties, but remained almost exclusively in the hands of royalty and the nobility. Ordinary people had no way of keeping track of the slow ravages of time on their own faces. “How could one see one's double chin in the bottom of a copper pot?” asks historian Veronique Nahoum, concluding that, the mirror stage is not only an important one for the baby of six months, but an important stage in history' [author's italics]. The anthropologist David Le Breton concurs, stressing that no mirror would decorate the walls [of ordinary homes] before the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century.' This lack of self-awareness, in the visual sense at least, helps to explain the hysteria that accompanied the early years of photography. No less a visionary than Honord de Balzac refused to be photographed - in the belief that it would strip away a microscopic layer of his being. Balzac was not alone in intellectual circles for believing the medium to have suspect properties; Herman Melville was another who flatly refused to be photographed. (p.16)

For photoliterate peoples like ourselves, the image we see in the mirror is fugitive: you 'know' it isn't there when you aren't looking. But for a people who live without mirrors, the image is fixed - the proof being that every time you sneak a glance, you're there. How could it be anything other than magic, and terrifying at that? After all, if a shadow is 'attached' to the body, why not the image? The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, having witnessed a twentieth-century variant of the experience in his work with natives of New Guinea, has been able to shed light on this phenomenon. Presented with mirrors for the first time in their lives, their natural habitat of muddy rivers and wells having offered no natural reflections, his subjects reacted with extreme consternation (they later behaved the same way when presented with their photographs). Carpenter reasoned: The notion that man possesses, in addition to a physical self, a symbolic self is widespread, perhaps universal.... A mirror corroborates this. It does more: it reveals the symbolic self outside the physical self. The symbolic self is suddenly explicit, public, vulnerable. Man's initial response to this is probably always traumatic." (pp. 17-18)

Ewing, W. A. 2006, Face: The New Photographic Portrait, Thames & Hudson

"The self-portrait supposes in theory the use of a mirror; glass mirrors became available in Europe in the 15th century. The first mirrors used were convex, introducing deformations that the artist sometimes preserved. A painting by Parmigianinoin 1524 Self-portrait in a mirror, demonstrates the phenomenon.

Mirrors permit surprising compositions like the Triple self-portrait by Johannes Gumpp (1646), or more recently that of Salvador Dalíshown from the back painting his wife, Gala(1972-73). This use of the mirror often results in right-handed painters representing themselves as left-handed (and vice versa). Usually the face painted is therefore a mirror image of that the rest of the world saw, unless two mirrors were used. Most of Rembrandt's self-portraits before 1660 show only one hand - the painting hand is left unpainted. He appears to have bought a larger mirror in about 1652, after which his self-portraits become larger. In 1658 a large mirror in a wood frame broke whilst being transported to his house; nonetheless, in this year he completed his Frick self-portrait, his largest.

The size of single-sheet mirrors was restricted until technical advances made in France in 1688 by Bernard Perrot. They also remained very fragile, and large ones were much more expensive pro-rata than small ones - the breakages were recut into small pieces. About 80 cms, or two and a half feet, seems to have been the maximum size until then - roughly the size of the palace mirror in Las Meninas (the convex mirror in the Arnolfini Portraitis considered by historians impractically large, one of Van Eyck's many cunning distortions of scale). Largely for this reason, most early self-portraits show painters at no more than half-length." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait

see too :
Haley, Stephen John. 2005. Mirror as metasign : contemporary culture as mirror world,
a free .pdf copy here .   Fascinating reading.