picturesque
picturesque,
an eighteenth-century theory of landscape which had particular application in the fields of bucolic literature, *pastoral poetry, *landscape painting, and *landscape gardening [see *literary theory, 41].
Situated midway, aesthetically and chronologically, between the historicizing landscapes of the seventeenth century and the later *sublime landscapes of the Romantic period, the picturesque is an aesthetic category with distinctive characteristics. Principal among these is the idea of variety in landscape, revealed through an interest in irregularity, ruggedness, rusticity, intricacy, singularity, and chiaroscuro. These are the qualities which the leading theorist of the visual picturesque, the Revd William *Gilpin, identified in his Three Essays (1792) as stimulating to the imagination, to reverie, or admiration.
However, Gilpin did not assume that such qualities occurred naturally. They needed to be combined by the artist into a pleasing composition. For the landscape was not in itself picturesque; rather, it contained picturesque potential. Thus whilst the qualities of the picturesque are in opposition to the ordered compositions of the historical landscape, the artist in search of the picturesque needed a receptive eye and a willing imagination.
One technical aid to the discovery of the picturesque was found in the Claude glass, a tinted convex mirror which was designed to render the scene like a picture. The device, so called because it imitated the compositional and tonal dispositions favoured by the seventeenth-century landscapist Claude Lorrain (1600–82), was used by both artists and tourists. Gilpin lauded its ability to transform nature into ‘the brilliant landscapes of a dream’.
Landscape gardening was another way to improve nature on picturesque principles. By the later eighteenth century the English park was strewn with picturesque ruins in the *Gothic style complemented by cataracts of water and outcrops of rocks.
Uvedale *Price's Essay on the Picturesque (vol. I, 1794, vols. I–II, 1796–8) argued that the fashion for historicizing landscapes (here characterized as a continental import) had failed to acknowledge the inherent qualities of the English landscape. This celebration of nature after landscape's colonization by the followers of Claude Lorrain opened the way for the Romantic landscape to play on the emotions, and not, as hitherto, on reason.
Illustrations of the picturesque, such as those that adorn Richard Payne *Knight's poem, The Landscape (1794), show, in the manner of A. W. N. *Pugin's Contrasts (1836), the advantages of the ‘native’ style over continental imports. The Claudian parks of Lancelot ‘Capability’ *Brown give way to wilderness, and classicizing neo-Palladian mansions to Tudor Gothic piles. Thus the picturesque established local styles shorn of the classicizing ideals of continental theories of beauty. It inaugurated a native aesthetic leading to a celebration of the English countryside in the paintings of J. M. W. *Turner and John *Constable.
