Illustration from Malton's, A Compleat Treatise on Perspective, 1776. Thomas Malton (1748 - March 7 1804) was an English painter of topographical and architectural views. His book was widely used during the 18th century by artists and painters as the basic text on perspective. Malton engraving of a staircase, with open strings and plain balusters typical of the late Georgian style, two landings lit by large Venetian windows and ceilings adorned with paneled plasterwork. The gridlines and vanishing points demonstrate the extent to which proportion governed the design of Georgian interiors, and the way in which size of the elements relate to each other and to the scale of the human figure. Perspective, in context of vision and visual perception, is the way in which objects appear to the eye based on their spatial attributes; or their dimensions and the position of the eye relative to the objects. Perspective in the graphic arts, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface, of an image as it is seen by the eye.