Picturesque

Picturesque. C18 English aesthetic category that was hugely influential throughout Europe. It was a standard of taste, largely concerned with landscape, and with emotional responses to associations evocative of passions or events. From Pittoresco (‘in the manner of the painters’), it was also associated with carefully contrived landscape paintings, particularly those of Claude Lorraine (1600–82), Salvator Rosa (1615–73), and the two Poussins (1615–75 and 1593–1665). It was essentially an anti-urban aesthetic concerned with sensibility, linked to notions of pleasing the eye with compositions reminiscent of those in paintings. To Sir Uvedale Price the Picturesque comprised all the qualities of nature and art that could be discerned in paintings executed since the time of Titian (c.1485–1576), and he argued in his Essay on the Picturesque (1794) in favour of ‘natural’ beauty, deploring contemporary fashions, such as those established by ‘Capability’ Brown for laying out grounds, because they were at variance with all the principles of landscape-painting. Price's arguments were set out by Richard Payne Knight in his didactic poem The Landscape (1794), and both men had considerable influence over the design of gardens and landscapes in later years, helping to create a climate in which the asymmetrical and informal aspects of much architectural and landscape design developed in C19. However, Price and Knight also conceded that there was always a place in a Picturesque landscape for formal and symmetrical composition, just as could be seen in many paintings. Picturesque scenes were full of variety, interesting detail, and elements drawn from any sources, so were neither serene (like the Beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime).

In architectural terms, the asymmetrical villas of John Nash, for example, were a product of the Picturesque, and the freeing of architectural composition from the tyranny of symmetry was undoubtedly due to ideas of the Picturesque, a term that suggested variety, smallness, irregularity, roughness of texture, and an association with the power to stimulate imagination. Thus the Picturesque led to eclecticism and, by its appreciation of variety and asymmetry, to the Gothic and other Revivals.

Bibliography

M. Andrews (ed.) (1994);
Ballantyne (1997);
Chilvers Osborne & Farr (eds.) (1988);
Colvin & J. Harris (eds.) (1970);
Copley & Garside (eds.) (1995);
Crook (1987);
Hunt (1992, 2002);
Hussey (1967a);
Knight (1794, 1972);
H. Osborne (1970);
Papworth & Placzek (eds.) (1977);
Pevsner (1968, 1974);
Price (1810);
Summerson (ed.) (1993);
D. Watkin (1982a)