Glasses at any ages, in any times

Glasses, stand for the sight, is regrettably an almost compulsory accessory at the moment (or at any time) of the life.
Because even if you are lucky enough of an impeccable sight during your youth and your adult's life,
comes almost always at about 50-60 years the obligation to wear it.

This universal object is not however easy to illustrate.

• To find a historic portrait of spectacled character is rather difficult. Doubtless because glasses with their branches, such as we know them today did not exist.
• Broadcast a contemporary portrait of spectacled person is not simple thing and is not very significant of the theme of Glasses, because then the face passes before the object.
• Even in the street-art (that I call Graph' wall) rare are the displays of people in glasses.
• All stays which can be similar to shop windows, rather rich in people in glasses.

So except Graph' wall (see the series) or the other street entertainments, and the engravings of time, the essential pivot of this display of glasses results from a sculpture seen in Lucerne, placed in front of the Central store Optic of Lucerne, and the owners of which kindly authorized me to use them here, by preferring however to keep confidential the name of the artist sculptor.
Other photos of Lucerne can be seen on on one of my other sites

What we said about it in 1690 in the dictionary of Furetière :

Glasses, in the plural, are two glasses set in the horn, or the other material, than we apply down at the bows and in front of eyes, to help to the old men, and to those who are short-sighted, to read and to write, or to discover better objects. We also call them glasses. There is which serve to enlarge objects, the others to preserve only the sight, which we call cans of food. We also made glasses for long sight, to apply to both eyes, which we call lorgnettes, of which wrote Father Cherubin Capucin, and before him Father Rheita of the same Order, in its entitled Book, Oculus Enoch and Eliae, who had also found the invention of glasses for three or in four glasses. To finish the perfection of glasses, we found the means to apply a wire-mesh or a railing of very-loose nets to the convex eye glass; what returns the more just observation. We see the figure in the Newspaper of the Scholars of year 1667. Glasses were certainly unknown in the Former ; but also they are not so modern as the telescope. Franceico Reddi claims that the invention was found there in the XIIIth century since the year 1280 until 1311 and that Brother Alexandre Delpina of the order of the Preaching friars of St. Catherine de Pise, who died from the year 1313 communicated the invention, whom he found of himself(itself), after he had learnt that the other one had found the secret, which he did not want to communicate.

It is written in the Chronicle of this Convent. He still says, that in an old Manuscript consisted in 1299 which he has among his Books, he is spoken about glasses as about thing invented at that time: that a famous Jacobin, named Jourdan de Rivalto in a Treaty which he composed in 1305 said expressly which there was not another 20 years when glasses were found. He still quotes Bernard Cordon in his Book of Lillium Medicinae, consisted in the same year, when he speaks about an eye drops which was good to make read an old man without glasses. Of said Cange that there is a Greek Poem which is in manuscript in the Library of the Roy, which shows that glasses were used from the year 1150. And it is mentioned these glasses in the Dictionary of Crusca in the word Occhiale. Year 1363 is also mentioned it in the Book of Guy de Chauliac Professor of Medicine in Montpelier, entitled the Big Surgery, consisted dice. There is also a ruling of November 12th, 1416 reported by Ménage in the Book Amoenitates Juris, which mentions these glasses; and other former testimonies quote by Sr. Comiers in his Treaty of glasses, after Mr. Redi Médecin Italien who wrote it very learnedly.

Below, the other article and the engravings of former

Former glasses Chinese
Extract of Magasin Pittoresque of 1837

Chinese, for a long time before the Westerners,
had already included the interest of the branches of glasses (in the form of cords with counterweight)

We could draw up a list curious about all the useful discoveries which made the Chinese, without they seem to have been guided by the slightest scientific knowledge.

Without knowing a single point of the theory of the optics, which deals with the convergence and with the difference of the beams of the light by means of lenses of various forms, they use(get) glasses or rather convex and concave crystals to help the sight.
Their glass is usually of a quality very lower, and in Canton they are satisfied with credit note of the broken glass of Europe to melt it and take advantage of it. They do not use it for glasses, but replace it by the rock crystal. If something could prove that they borrowed their former glasses to no people, and that they really invented them, it would be undoubtedly their size, their singular shape, and the strange way they adjust them. The engraving above represents a pair; we see that it likes ears by means of silk cords.
To face the brightness of the sun, they make use of a mineral which they call tcha-chi or " stone with tea ", because of the resemblance which exists between its transparent color and that of a weak infusion of black tea. It is probably of the hazy quartz either the flint allied to the cairngoran of the Scotland.

Other engravings of former glasses

Glasses pince-nez, and in this time, the reading was made in the light of candles.

Politician, German engraving, unsigned,
probably late 1700, early 1800

Elegant woman's glasses,
such as represented by Bob, illustrating the work
Smart People, of GYP, publishing 1895

Other glasses pince-nez with its cordon, carried by Juana Richard Lesclide

The dress completes of woman in glasses in bicycle,
extracts from Contemporary Figures of the album Mariani, 1896

Rare example of eyeglass with cordon, carried by Theodore Johnson

Theodore Jonhson's portrait,
extracts from Contemporary Figures of the album Mariani, 1896