"Why did the Peales, together with so many of their contemporaries, find optical illusions so enticing?"

Pleasing Deceptions
Wendy Bellion

Part I | II

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Americans in metropolitan centers could purchase zograscopes and other optical devices directly from local retailers. Indeed, as early as 1758, Hannah Breintwell was importing and selling "perspectives with multiplying glasses" in her shop "at the sign of the spectacles" in Philadelphia, and John Sparhawk stocked camera obscuras and convex mirrors at his Second Street bookstore in 1773. In the decades to come, Philadelphia booksellers and instrument makers regularly advertised a variety of illusionistic images and devices. John McAllister cornered the market in the early 1800s when he expanded his business in whips and canes to include "prospects" (perspective views), "spy glasses" (small telescopes), and microscopes. Sales of just a few magic lanterns and camera obscuras earned McAllister a gross profit of twenty-two dollars in the summer of 1804.

Those without the means or inclination to purchase optical devices could attend public exhibitions and performances of visual deception. Benjamin Franklin printed a broadside in 1744 to advertise a solar "or camera obscura" microscope which had "just arrived from London, for the entertainment of the curious and others, and is now to be seen, by six or more, in a large commodious room, at the house of Mr. Vidal, in Second-Street." In later years, itinerant lecturers in natural philosophy often featured demonstrations of optical illusion: Signor Falconi, an Italian impresario who entertained Philadelphians with a course on "perpetual electricity" in 1796, made a point of including a lesson about the "pleasing deceptions" that could be "invented by the power of lights, and how far the Catroptricks [sic] can deceive the sight." Other enterprising showmen worked the length of the eastern seaboard, staging presentations of "philosophical optical machines" in taverns and theaters from Boston to Charleston. In 1791, for instance, Philadelphia hosted "a curious Transparent Optical representation of most of the remarkable cities and principal public buildings of Europe"; in 1797, the city was treated to "a curious optical machine representing the scenes which took place in the dungeons of the Bastille."

"Optical machines" were perspective boxes—also known as "peepshows"—and they were closely related to the zograscopes and perspective views that were privately enjoyed within parlors. One or more tubular lenses usually punctuated the near end of the box, and the far end contained a concave mirror. Most perspective boxes were made to exhibit perspective views, which were illuminated by transparent panels or candles inserted within. Some views of cityscapes were even pierced and backed by colored paper, so that street lamps and windows would appear to glow when backlit. Other perspective boxes were designed to produce illusions of a different sort. Joseph Harris instructed readers of his Treatise of Optics (1775) in the construction of a box that resembled a theatrical stage set: one long image extended across the back of the box, and sections of painted images ("a camp, a colonade [sic], or rows of trees &c.") were arrayed like wings along the sides. "Things being properly disposed, if the pictures are good and the subject well chose, the phenomena will be surprizing [sic] enough," Harris promised. William Hooper suggested further modifications, including a square of "Four Magical Mirrors" that multiplied images of the pictures inserted within, and a box of "Enchanted Mirrors" (illustrated in the upper right corner of fig. 4) that enabled four individuals to peer through ovals at reflections of adjacent spectators.

Fig. 4. Optical devices including the "Enchanted Mirrors" (fig. 3) and "Penetrating Perspective" (fig. 1), from William Hooper, Rational Recreations, in which the principles of numbers and natural philosophy are clearly and copiously elucidated . . . (London, 1774), vol. 2, plate 10. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Itinerant entertainers and street magicians were not the only ones who dazzled the public with feats of visual deception. Museum proprietors also capitalized upon the fascination with optics. In 1782, the French immigrant Pierre Eugene du Simitière, who operated a vast curiosity cabinet in Philadelphia named the American Museum, issued a broadside advertising one "curious deception of perspective" among his collection of natural and human-made wonders. This was probably the anamorphic print that now forms part of the du Simitière Papers at the Library Company of Philadelphia (fig. 5). Unlike perspective views and perspective boxes, which generated illusions of spatial depth, anamorphoses deceived through a radical distortion of linear perspective. To make sense of du Simitière's image, spectators had to assume an oblique angle in relation to the picture plane or insert the image within an optical device. Only then could they comprehend what the image represented: a view of a horse in profile.

Fig. 5. Anamorphic image of a horse (before 1785), colored engraving, 16 1/2 x 1 15/16 (base) x 1 15/16 (top) in. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

New York City's Gardiner Baker also understood the popular appeal of optical illusions. In 1797, "an obtical [sic] glass to shew [sic] prints" was among the highlights of his institution, which, like du Simitière's, was also called the American Museum. When Charles Willson Peale made his third trip to this museum in 1817 (by which time it was under the stewardship of John Scudder), his attention immediately seized upon a large perspective box that had been configured for simultaneous use by several people. "[There were] a number of perspective Views," he observed, "shewn [sic] through lens[es] of long focus placed in a [partition] convenient distances from each other, so that a number of Persons might view them at the same time—the prints being placed behind the [partition] & lighted by a side window." Peale returned to the museum a few days later to inspect the device again:

In 1805, inspired by Scudder's perspective box—or perhaps spurred by the competition posed by Christopher Winckelback, a visiting Swissman who staged exhibitions of an "optic glass"—Peale installed the first of many future optical devices in his Philadelphia Museum. (Optical metaphors had already informed Peale's mission for years, as when he challenged skeptics who doubted the museum's civic worth to see the place for themselves: "let occular [sic] demonstrations prove the extent of his merit," he stated in a newspaper address.) Peale's description of the instrument, which he also sketched in a letter to his son Raphaelle, indicates that it closely resembled Hooper's "Penetrating Perspectives" (illustrated in the upper left corner of fig. 4). "We have added to the Museum a Tube to speak from one end to the other, also an optical delusion," Peale explained to Raphaelle. "The bottom part being hid in the table, the communication by the reflecting Glasses is completely disguised, and it appears wonderful to the most of our visitors that a hat or any thick substance put between the tubes should not obstruct the sight of objects put at the opposite end." A museum broadside of 1813 cited "various optical amusements," and in 1818, Peale added a "contrivance of mirrors" designed by his son Rembrandt.

By 1822, the Philadelphia Museum also boasted a device that Peale called simply "the magnifiers." This was probably a pair of convex lenses set within a tabletop zograscope or freestanding perspective box. Peale decided to test the instrument's illusionistic capabilities; aided by his son Titian Ramsay Peale II, Peale used a drawing machine to sketch the dimensions of the "Long Room," the museum's main gallery on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House. The sketch was a preparatory study for The Artist in his Museum (1822), a large self-portrait commissioned by the museum's trustees, but Peale found an additional application for it. "It looks beautiful through the magnifiers," Peale enthused to his son Rubens (yet another member of the Peale family named for a famous painter). "Coleman [Sellers, Peale's son-in-law], seeing it yesterday, says that it deceived him, he thought he was viewing the Museum in the looking glasses at the end of the Museum. He thinks it might be a good deception, to see it in another room and wood [sic] have a good effect on Visitors." Rubens Peale shared his father's enthusiasm, and in December he exhibited the "Long Room" drawing in a perspective box at the family's Baltimore Museum. "On receipt of the drawing by Titian, I placed it in the optic case instead of the Tyger Hunt, and it gives very great satisfaction," he reported.

Why did the Peales, together with so many of their contemporaries, find optical illusions so enticing? There are several possible explanations. By instructing individuals in the laws of optics and inviting them to explore the bounds of art and science, visual deceptions satisfied the contemporary yen for "useful knowledge"—a republican ethos of pragmatic learning that was widely advocated in the decades following the Revolutionary War. Another part of the answer resides in the anxious curiosity about all modes of illusion that characterized Anglo-American culture during these years. While novelists and playwrights spun tales of malicious ventriloquists and dissimulating politicians, ordinary spectators tried to unravel the concealed mechanics of mirrored boxes and magic lanterns. The phrase "pleasing deceptions" perfectly conveys the sense of amusement and gratification they must have experienced. Potential agents of mischief, illusions of light and reflection also inspired delight. And, like Francis Hopkinson, few people were immune to the enticement of unknown optical wonders. On a Philadelphia stoop or in a New York museum, pleasing deceptions opened eyes and minds to the marvels of the visual world.

Further reading:

Primary accounts of optical illusions in early national America include "Anecdote of a Remarkable Deceptio Visus, as related by Baron de Tot," Columbian Magazine (October 1787): 718; Francis Hopkinson, "An Optical Problem, Proposed to Mr. Rittenhouse, and Solved by Him," in The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hopkinson, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1792), 1:375-84; and David Rittenhouse, "Explanation of an Optical Deception," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 2 (1786), 37-42. Charles Willson Peale's many comments on optical devices and incidents of visual deception, together with observations made by members of his extended family, are reproduced on microfiche in Lillian B. Miller, ed., Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family, 1735-1885 (Millwood, N.Y., 1980), and reprinted in Miller, Sidney Hart, Toby A. Appel, and David C. Ward, eds., The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family, 5 vols. (New Haven and London, 1983-2000). Thomas Jefferson is quoted in Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 318. Peale's watercolor drawing of the "Long Room" is in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts; for a reproduction, see Miller, E.P. Richardson, and Brooke Hindle, Charles Willson Peale and his World (New York, 1983).

Dozens of optical treatises and catalogues were printed in Europe and North America during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This essay draws mainly upon the following sources: George Adams, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy, considered in its present state of improvement, ed. William Jones, 4 vols. (Whitehall, Penn., 1806-7); Joseph Harris, A Treatise of Optics (London, 1775); William Hooper, Rational Recreations, in which the principles of numbers and natural philosophy are clearly and copiously elucidated, by a series of easy, entertaining, interesting experiments, 4 vols. (London, 1774); Jeremiah Joyce, Scientific Dialogues (Philadelphia, 1817); A Catalogue of Philosophical, Optical, and Mathematical Instruments Made and Sold by Benjamin Martin, ([London], n.d.); [W. and S. Jones], A Catalogue of Optical Instruments (London, 1801); A Catalogue of Mathematical, Optical, and Philosophical Instruments, made and sold by Gilbert, Wright, and Hooke, no. 148, Leadenhall-Street, London (London, c. 1800); and A Catalogue of Optical, Mathematical, and Philosophical Instruments, Made and Sold by John Bleuler, No. 27, Ludgate Street, London (London, before 1824). The McAllister Family Papers, which includes a daybook listing sales of camera obscuras and related devices for 1803-05, is housed in the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Museum, Library, and Gardens. Winterthur's museum collection also includes several zograscopes and an extensive collection of perspective views.

Numerous advertisements for optical devices and illusionistic spectacles—including those of Hannah Breintwell and John Sparhawk—are collected at Winterthur in the Alfred Cox Prime Files, Decorative Arts Photographic Collection. For additional primary and secondary accounts, see David Brigham, "'A World in Miniature': Charles Willson Peale's Philadelphia Museum and its audience, 1786-1827" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992), "Appendix I: Notices of Public Leisure Alternatives in Philadelphia"; [Benjamin Franklin], "Just arrived from London…" (Philadelphia, 1744), broadsheet; Rita S. Gottesman, ed., The Arts and Crafts in New York, 1726-1776; Advertisements and News Items from New York City Newspapers (New York, 1938, reprint 1970); Alfred Coxe Prime, compiler and ed., The Arts & Crafts in Philadelphia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 1788-1800, Gleanings from Newspapers, 2 vols. (1929, facsimile reprint 1969); and J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1884), esp. vol. 2.

Barbara Maria Stafford has extensively explored the problem of visual deception in its scientific, cultural, and philosophical aspects. See especially Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1994), in which Stafford analyzes the emergence and discourse of popular scientific manuals published in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe; and Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: The World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles, 2001), the catalogue of a recent exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Recent studies of deception in early America include James F. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2001); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2000); Gordon Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth-Century," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 39 (1982): 401-41, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. For specialized studies relevant to this essay, see Brooke Hindle and Helen M. Hindle, "David Rittenhouse and the Illusion of Reversible Relief," in Early American Science (New York, 1976): 145-50; and Deborah Warner, "Optics in Philadelphia during the Nineteenth Century," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 129:3 (1985), 291-99.

Among the many optical devices manufactured and used during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, three types of instruments have attracted the greatest scholarly interest: camera obscuras, zograscopes, and perspective boxes. On camera obscuras, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990); Mary Hammond, "The Camera Obscura" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1986); David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York, 2001); and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London, 1990). On zograscopes and perspective boxes, see Richard Balzer, Peepshows: A Visual History (New York,1998); Erin Blake, "Zograscopes, Perspective Prints, and the Mapping of Polite Space in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2000); Dennis Carr, "Optical Machines, Prints, and Gentility in Early America" (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware-Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, 1999); J.A. Chaldecott, "The Zograscope or Optical Diagonal Machine," Annals of Science 9:6 (December 1953): 315-22; E. McSherry Fowble, To Please Every Taste: Eighteenth-Century Prints from the Winterthur Museum (Alexandria, Va., 1991), 192-5, and, Two Centuries of Prints in America, 1680-1880 (Charlottesville, Va., 1987), 249-51; R.F. Johnson, "A Machine for Viewing Prints," Country Life 125 (February 5, 1959): 252; and C.J. Kaldenbach, "Perspective Views," Print Quarterly 2:1 (March 1985): 87-105.

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