Long before the invention of the camera, British travels perception of the lands they visited was often determined by a series of visual or pictorial techniques. Sometimes these involved the use of viewing devices, such as concave mirrors and tinted glass. Primarily, however, travellers organized the scene before them through concepts derived from aesthetic theory but also learned from experience in looking at landscape paintings and illustrations ("picturesque" and "rustic" or "naturalistic" schools) and genre paintings. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, British travel writers had become adept at breaking up a landscape and describing its parts as if it were a painting. In fact, writers frequently called the view before them a "picture."
These pictorial techniques did not only determined the way travel writers perceived the landscape. They also shaped the way they described the people whom they encountered. "Natives" were often depicted as forming "picturesque" figures in the landscape or adding to the rustic quality, especially color, of a particular setting. Windows of houses or carriages acted as handy devices for "framing" peasants, who, thus captured, become subjects of the author's imaginative attempt to read a story in them, as if they were a part of a genre painting.
Pre-Famine Ireland, however, presented a particular challenge to British travel writers. The extent and depth of rural poverty clashed with the picturesque, occasionally, sublime scenery, making the usual romantic techniques of fitting people into the landscape problematic at best. Unlike painters, who could choose to minimize the human presence in a picture, it was part of the explicit task of travel writers to describe people, as well as place. In this circumstance the pictorial techniques alluded to above were often used to try to "distance" both author and reader from the harsh realities of Irish poverty. The young girl caught in the window's frame could be made the subject of romantic speculation, her economic situation reduced for the moment to a "picturesque" condition.
This paper will focus on the application of pictorial techniques to people. The work is part of a broader research project on British perceptions of Pre-Famine Ireland as depicted in travel accounts written from 1750 to 1850.
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