Repton's lavishly illustrated texts served to record past accomplishments as wells as to advertise his skills as a landscape architect. The over-slips that allow for "before" and "after" views of a property were particularly important as they testified to the dramatic results Repton promised.
Epitomized by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Watching a Sea of Fog (c. 1817-18), and the Wordsworthian peripatetic, the gentlemanly or artistic wanderer is integral to the Romantic imagination. Wandering lies at the heart of picturesque sightseeing, blank verse poetry, specimen collecting, and the Romantic cultivation of self. However, these forms of sanctioned wandering exist against a backdrop of less desirable movements that, nonetheless, inform, color and at times literally converge with the endorsed amblings of the inquisitive artist-gentlemen.
This text and its illustrative plates demonstrate how to create optical instruments for recreational scientific experiments.
Hooper's text and its images describe how to create optical instruments for recreational scientific experiments.
The text and its accompanying plates delineate how to create optical instruments for recreational scientific experiments.
The camera obscura portrayed here is an excellent example of Ferguson’s interest in the physical properties of the scientific problem at hand.
As evidenced in the sustained revision, expansion, and republication of Jacques Ozanam’s original work on recreational experiments from the late seventeenth century to the nineteenth, optical technologies and rational experiments stimulated the Romantic visual imagination and reinforced the emphasis on edification and self-improvement through efforts at practical education in the domestic spher
“Plate II” features seven illustrations to accompany the sections of Priestley’s text, entitled “Period I: The Revival of Letters in Europe,” and “Period II: From the Revival of letters in Europe to the discoveries of Snellius and Descartes.” Figure 10 illustrated a parabolic mirror or burning mirror, the type of which was used to light fires in ancient times by focusing the sun’s rays; P
“Plate 15” from Nouvelles recreations exemplifies the dual purpose of many scientific recreation texts: to explain the physical science in question and to instruct the reader on how to easily recreate and perform scientific experiments.
“Plate 57” features seven illustrations to accompany Chapters XV, XVI, and XVII of Book III in A Compleat System of Opticks; these chapters describe the science behind a variety of optical and image-making machines. Figure 635 is a type of portable camera obscura for drawing made by a Mr. Scarlet, who had a shop near St.
