You know how your parents used to say things like 'this is what we did before TV"? Now I find myself telling my son "this is what we did before the internet" as I do yet another embarrassing thing like dancing with the dog (he’s a very big dog and when he stands on his hind legs he’s almost my height and so he’s a good dance partner) or singing along to some tune which ironically, given my lack of stereo at the moment, will be playing on the internet.
Well, here's an example of something we used to think was mad fun before any of it.
These are 'vues d’optiques' and I won't insult you by translating that into English. They were in fact according to Wikipedia an English invention, and were in any case called ‘vues optiques’ by English-speakers. They appeared in the earlier part of the 18th century, but France, doing what France does so well, nicked the idea and refined it and disseminated it (no judgement this time France, you can nick away from the English, god knows it’s been a long two-way street!). They were all the rage from about 1740 until the turn of the century, when they fell out of fashion. Admission: most of the following is simply my translation of French Wikipedia, because I knew absolutely nothing about these before I decided to show them to you, although I have had a few tucked away for a couple of years.
Vues d’optiques are engravings, almost always of a scenic well-known landscape or building or interior, which have been coloured by hand in gouache or watercolour. They usually have a title stating what the viewer is looking at, but the most important thing is that they have a sharp use of perspective, with the eye of the viewer being led to a vanishing point in the centre of the picture.
Although they can be viewed as-is, and make very pretty representations of landscapes and sights as they were 250+ years ago, they were designed to be viewed through purpose-built contraptions called zograscopes (I love this word, it's like someone just made it up - "what can we call this amazing modern clumsy contraption that I just invented? Hmmmm, a Zograscope!” ), a contraption fitted with a large lens which was convex on both sides, and a mirror, or through an optical box, which I am guessing functioned in the same way, but was a box (!). When viewed through the lens, the two-dimensional image took on the illusion of three-dimensional depth, with a foreground and middle ground leading to the central vanishing point. French Wiki says there were also examples of vues d’optiques which were perforated, designed to be seen illuminated from behind, to give the impression of an illuminated night used for scenes like displays of fireworks.
Yves, the dealer who sold me these ones, told me he's only had a couple of zograscopes pass through his hands in the decades he's been working, and they are pretty expensive so the likelihood of me seeing one of these images as it was meant to be seen is not high. [Edit: one of you lovely people has commented with a link below which shows what a view through a zograscope looks like!] But strangely enough I think I can imagine them pretty well, and I think they informed a lot of French design and even French cinema for the centuries that came after. Certainly they were one of the primitive precursors of French photography and cinema, a sort of leap from a landscape that you admired on a wall statically to a landscape that you were encouraged to take part in. And I can see echoes of this delicate design and spatial arrangements and also that sort of wonder about things, the French notion of beauty and ephemerality and dreamlike otherworldliness that is often present in French literature and cinema, and sometimes even in the landscape as I drive alone in my car through the backroads searching for pieces.
Anyway, have a look. There are some of these available on my website. These are not yet rare objects, not everyday common but not rare - they were produced in their tens of thousands throughout Europe but Paris was one of those centres of production. And they will be rare eventually, so if they grab your fancy, now's your chance.
I'm ccing the link of the page where I found the etymology of the word, because it includes a video of someone looking through a zograscope in a museum, to give you an idea of the experience: https://www.revolutionfrancaise.website/2022/07/zograscope-et-vues-doptiques-pour-vous.html
"Zograscope" is just a great word. So funny! I've been looking into the origin of the word, because its etymology seemed clearly Greek. Here's what I found: "zo" = "life"; "grapho"/"scopein" = "to observe, to see". So the word would mean "to see and register life". And just because I'm a little fastidious with words: in French, you say "vue d'optique", not "vue optique". Thanks for the history of this beautiful images!