Picturesque - Background, Notable works

A word used vaguely nowadays to mean ‘as pretty as a picture’, but in the 18th-c much discussed as an aesthetic category in its own right, somewhere between ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’. It was applied mainly to rugged landscapes with rocks, waterfalls, and winding paths.

Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal first introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations of the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wakes, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1700, a practical book which instructed Englands leisured travelers to examine "the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty". Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part the emerging Romanticism sensibility of the 18th century.

As the title of Gilpin's work suggests, picturesque needs to be explained in terms of its relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: those of the beautiful and the sublime. Aesthetic experience was not just a rational decision - one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beautiful - rather it was a matter of basic human instinct and came naturally. Picturesque arose as a mediator between the opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, showing the possibilities that existed in between these two rationally idealized states. See also Gilpin and the picturesque.

Background

During the mid 18th century the idea of purely scenic pleasure touring began to take hold among the English leisured class. Gilpin's work was a direct challenge to the ideology of the well established Grand Tour, showing how an exploration of rural Britain could compete with classically oriented tours of the Continent. The irregular, anti-classical, ruins and even ruined people - the ragged poor (viewed from a safe distance of course) - became sought after themes. Picturesque-hunters began crowding the Lake District to make sketches using a 'Claude Glass' - tinted portable mirrors to frame and darken the scenes they visited, it was named after 17th century landscape painter Claude Lorraine whose work Gilpin saw as synonymous with the picturesque and who Gilpin encouraged emulation. Henry James exclaimed in Albano in the 1870's "I have talked of the picturesque all my life;

Picturesque tourists were also encouraged to reshape the landscapes as settings for English country houses, exemplified by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown.

Picturesque meaning literally "in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture" was a word used as early as 1703 (Oxford English Dictionary), and derived from an Italian term pittoresco, meaning, "in the manner of a painter," William Gilpin's Essay on Prints (1768) defined picturesque as " ...

Notable works

Gilpin's Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting was published in London, 1792. A third great essay on the Picturesque was Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; 1803 (1874) considered a classic of picturesque travel writing. Humphry Repton applied picturesque theory to the practice of landscape design. In conjunction with the work of Price and Knight, this led to the 'picturesque theory' that designed landscapes should be composed like landscape paintings with a foreground, a middleground and a background. John Ruskin identified the "picturesque" as a genuinely modern aesthetic category, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. In modern times, the essay by the English architectural historian Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, 1927 focused modern thinking on the development of this approach. The picturesque idea continues to have a profound influence on garden design and planting design.