In the image that graces the cover of this book (see fig. I.1), we see Sophia Anne Delaval, in the descriptive words of its title, ‘holding a “Claude glass” or “landscape mirror” to the landscape’. The reflected landscape, contained within the tight bounds of the proffered mirror, floats freely before the verdant landscape within which Delaval stands – indeed the two are remarkably similar, perhaps indicating something of the homogenising effect of the Claude glass, which, like other optical devices deployed in the pursuit of the picturesque, framed and rendered landscapes in pictorial terms derived from the paintings of such seventeenth-century European masters as Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa. Edward Alcock’s painting, with its lush costuming and pastoral setting, epitomises a moment when such pursuits were gaining popularity as pervasive and genteel artistic practices, reflecting not only the conventions of eighteenth-century portraiture, but the extent of the culture of visuality that took hold in Britain from the mid-1800s onward. Cleverly, however, neither the painter, nor the viewer of the portrait, are visible in the mirror, where one might, on perspectival grounds, expect them to be. Delaval’s posture and intense gaze invite us to look at the miniature view she holds out to us – a view, moreover, of the landscape behind us, one that she herself sees – but where are we, and where should we rest our eager eyes? What promises are held, and what broken, in this aesthetic exchange – of looks, perspectives, and subject positions, that both interpolate and exclude the viewer – and that appear to pose the question, ‘what if’?

This painting, which dates from the late 1770s, is poised on the threshold of changes – and further exchanges – that might be understood to reframe as well as respond to the many questions it raises. From the creation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the civic-minded establishment of London’s National Gallery in 1824, the Romantic period witnessed important developments in how art was conceived, produced and consumed.