Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's leisured travellers 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 of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century.
In England the word 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 French pittoresque and the Italian pittoresco. Gilpin's Essay on Prints (1768) defined picturesque as "a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture" (p. xii).
picturesque
The pictorial genre called "Picturesque" appeared in the 17th century and flourished in the 18th. As well as portraying beauty in the classical manner, eighteenth-century artists could overdo it from top to bottom. Their pre-Romantic sensitivity could aspire to the sublime or be pleased with the picturesque. According to Christopher Hussey, "While the outstanding qualities of the sublime were vastness and obscurity, and those of the beautiful smoothness and gentleness", the characteristics of the picturesque were "roughness and sudden variation joined to irregularity of form, colour, lighting, and even sound".[7] The first option is the harmonic and classical (i. e. beauty); the second, the grandiose and terrifying (i. e. the sublime); and the third, the rustic, corresponding to the picturesque and connecting qualities of the first two options. This triple definition by Hussey, although modern, is true to the concept of the epoch, as Uvedale Price explained in 1794. The examples Price gave for these three aesthetic tendencies were Handel's music as the sublime, a pastorale by Arcangelo Corelli as the beautiful, and a painting of a Dutch landscape as the picturesque.
Temple's development of fashionable "sharawadgi" garden design was followed by Edmund Burke's 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke suggested a third category including those things which neither inspire awe with the sublime or pleasure with the beautiful. He called it "the picturesque" and qualified it to mean all that cannot fit into the two more rational states evoked by the other categories. A flurry of English authors beginning with William Gilpin and followed by Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price, and Humphrey Repton all called for promotion of the picturesque.
Gilpin wrote prolifically on the merits of touring the countryside of England. The naturally morose, craggy, pastoral, and untouched landscape of northern England and Scotland was a suitable endeavor for the rising middle classes, and Gilpin thought it almost patriotic to travel the homeland instead of the historically elite tour of the great European cities. One of the major commonalities of the picturesque style movement is the role of travel and its integration in designing one's home to enhance one's political and social standing. A simple description of the picturesque is the visual qualities of Nature suitable for a picture. However, Lockean philosophy had freed Nature from the ideal forms of allegory and classical pursuits, essentially embracing the imperfections in both landscapes and plants. In this way the idea progressed beyond the study of great landscape painters like Claude Deruet and Nicolas Poussin into experimentation with creating episodic, evocative, and contemplative landscapes in which elements were combined for their total effect as an individual picture.
Interest in landscape painting and in looking at the landscape itself grew rapidly through the second half of the eighteenth century. Definitions of types of landscape or view, seen from an aesthetic or artistic point of view, followed. At one extreme was the sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains) at the other the beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights. In between came the picturesque, views seen as being artistic but containing elements of wildness or irregularity.
The theory of the picturesque was developed by writers William Gilpin (Observations on the River Wye 1770) and Uvedale Price, who in 1794 published An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful.
In the 18th century, the term 'picturesque' was applied to a landscape that looked as if it had come straight out of a painting, but now the word has changed to mean that a scene is charming and quaint and would make a good picture. In the 18th century, the Picturesque, particularly in reference to landscape gardening, was a type of beauty characterised by an irregular and rough naturalism, most famously exemplified in the work of the English landscape gardener Capability Brown. As an aesthetic concept applied to painting, it looks back to the 'classical picturesque' style seen in the works of Claude and Poussin, and the Romantic picturesque derived from Elsheimer and Salvator Rosa.
"picture-like, possessing notably original and pleasing qualities," 1703, on pattern of French pittoresque, a loan-word from Italian pittoresco, literally "pictorial" (1660s), from pittore "painter," from Latin pictorem (nominative pictor); see painter (n.1). Of language (somewhat euphemistically), "graphic, vivid," by 1734. As a noun, "that which is picturesque," from 1749. Related: Picturesquely; picturesqueness.
Notoriously slippery, the picturesque can be hard to define. There are certain features of the genre: paintings will depict a natural scene abundant with variety, detail, and texture. Moreover, the picturesque is about how the art makes the viewer feel. Born from the emerging Romantic sensibilities of the 18th century, philosophers like Edmund Burke proposed that reactions to the aesthetic world were not rational, but instinctual. The middle ground between the pastoral ideals of beauty and the horrors of the sublime, picturesque landscape lifts up and inspires the senses with a feeling of awe, but not terror. It instills serenity but not complacency. It is at once alluring, ideal, and wild.
This was the last paragraph of three talks broadcast recently by Mr. Basil Taylor on the Third Programme. They were called English Art and the Picturesque and combined an analysis of eighteenth century picturesque theory with an indictment of its effects on England in the last twenty years, effects which Mr. Taylor attributed largely to THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW. 2ff7e9595c
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