picturesque

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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)

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.

Picturesque. Term covering a set of aesthetic ideas about landscape, both real and painted, that flourished in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Devotees of the Picturesque found pleasure in roughness and irregularity, and they tried to establish it as a critical category between the ‘Beautiful’ and the ‘Sublime’. 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 the Supplement to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by George Mason 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.

picturesque, a term which came into fashion in the late 18th cent., principally to describe a certain kind of scenery. Writers on the picturesque include W. Gilpin, W. Mason, William Payne Knight (1750–1824, who published The Landscape in 1794), Uvedale Price (1747–1829, who published Essays on the Picturesque, 1794), and the landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752–1818). The impact of these writers on the sensibility and vocabulary of writers of the 19th cent. was considerable. The ‘picturesque’, as defined by Price, was a new aesthetic category, to be added to Burke's recently established categories of the Sublime and the beautiful; its attributes were roughness and irregularity, and its most complete exponent in terms of painting was Salvator Rosa; Mrs Radcliffe's works dwell frequently on the picturesque, and J. Austen and many of her characters were familiar with the works of Gilpin. The entertaining aesthetic disputes of Price and Knight are satirized in Peacock's Headlong Hall, and Combe's adventures of Dr Syntax are aimed at the movement in general and Gilpin in particular. The development of the picturesque movement into Romanticism is a subject of much complexity and literary interest.

pic·tur·esque / ˌpikchəˈresk/ • adj. visually attractive, esp. in a quaint or pretty style: the picturesque covered bridges of New England. ∎  (of language) unusual and vivid: his picturesque speech contrasted with his rough appearance. DERIVATIVES: pic·tur·esque·ly adv. pic·tur·esque·ness n.

picturesque term used in 18th-century England to refer to a landscape that looked as if it had come out of an academic painting. Used as derogatory criticism of such painting, the picturesque was considered pretty rather than beautiful.

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