Guide to the Lakes

Before Thomas West published this book in 1778, the Lake District was just farmland and inaccessible hills to most English people. West lived there, and unlike travelers before him who merely passed through, he took readers on a deliberate tour of every lake in the region. More remarkably, he taught them how to see. Obsessed with the Claude glass that tinted convex mirror which made real landscapes resemble paintings by Claude Lorrain West showed readers not just what was there, but how to frame it, compose it, turn it into art. This short, enthusiastic guidebook essentially invented the Lake District as a destination and launched the cult of the picturesque across England. It laid the aesthetic groundwork for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and everything that followed. If you've ever stood before a mountain and tried to see it as a painting, as something beautiful because it resembles art, you're looking through eyes West first sharpened.