Picturesque

Picturesque. Term covering a set of aesthetic ideas about landscape and its depiction in art that flourished in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It indicated an approach that found pleasure in roughness and irregularity, and one of its main devotees, Sir Uvedale Price (in his Essay on the Picturesque, 1794), proposed that it should be regarded as a new critical category between the ‘Beautiful’ and the ‘Sublime’, as formulated by Edmund Burke in his treatise of 1757. Picturesque scenes were thus neither serene (like the Beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime), but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures—medieval ruins were quintessentially Picturesque. Natural scenery tended to be judged in terms of how closely it approximated to the paintings of favoured artists such as Gaspard Dughet, and in 1801 George Mason's Supplement to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary defined ‘Picturesque’ as: ‘what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from.’ The Picturesque Tour in search of suitable subjects was a feature of English landscape painting of the period, exemplified, for example, in the work of Girtin and (early in his career) of Turner, and the Picturesque generated a large literary output; much of it was pedantic and obsessive and it became a popular subject for satire (see Gilpin). Romanticism has some of its roots in the Picturesque.