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.
The term "picturesque" needs to be understood in relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: the beautiful and the sublime. By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment and rationalist ideas about aesthetics were being challenged by accounts of the experiences of beauty and sublimity that involved non-rational elements. Aesthetic experience was not just a simply deliberate, conscious rational decision based on principles of, e.g., symmetry, proportion, and harmony. It could come, for instance, more naturally as a matter of instinctual response involving the non-rational appetites. For instance, Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful argued that the soft gentle curves appealed to the male sexual desire, while the sublime horrors appealed to our desires for self-preservation.James Buzard: "The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840)". In: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2001), p. 45.
Picturesque arose as a mediator between these opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, showing the possibilities that existed between these two rationally idealised states. As Thomas Gray wrote in 1765 of the Scottish Highlands: "The mountains are ecstatic […]. None but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror."Glenn Hooper: "The Isles / Ireland: the wilder shore". In: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2001), p. 176.
In its usual modern sense it merely means "pretty", with an implication of fitting conventional or old-fashioned tastes.
Historical background and development
The picturesque as a topic in discourse came up in the late Renaissance in Italy where the term pittoresco began to be used in art writing as seen with Italian authors such as Vasari (1550), Lomazzo (1584), and Ridolfi (1648). The word is applied to the manner of depicting a subject in painting, roughly in the sense of "non-classical" or "painted non-academically" in a similar way as Dutch painters discussed developments in painting in the seventeenth century as "painter-like" (schilder-achtig). Highly instrumental in the establishing of a taste for the picturesque in northern Europe was landscape painting, in which the realism of the Dutch played a significant role. This cannot be seen separate from other developments in Europe.
Claude Lorrain (1604–1682) was a well-known French painter, who had developed landscape painting in Rome, like Poussin (1594–1665). Both painters worked in a somewhat stiff, mannered style, with a focus on archaeological remains and towering pine trees, followed by several Dutchmen who had also traveled to Rome. Soon, deviating from the classical ideal of perfection in beauty epitomized by healthy, towering trees, landscape painters came to discover the sublimity of the withered old tree; the two withered oaks by Jan van Goyen (1641) are a well-known example. For those who tried to find an answer to the classicism of French landscape painting, the lonely spruce at a wild cataract that caught the sublimity of nature became a recurring theme, most explicitly expressed by Jacob van Ruisdael. This painter painted picturesque garden scenes that can be seen as early representations of picturesque gardens in Europe. Similar landscape naturalism in English gardens emerged within cultural spheres around William and Mary from which the discussion on the picturesque in the English landscape took hold.
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).
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". 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. A more brutal version is a quip by Sydney Smith: "The parson's horse is beautiful, the curate's horse is picturesque".Quoted in Reynolds, Graham, A Concise History of Watercolours, p. 71, 1971, Thames & Hudson (World of Art),
During the mid 18th century the idea of purely scenic pleasure touring began to take hold among the English leisured class. This new image disregarded the principles of symmetry and perfect proportions while focusing more on "accidental irregularity," and moving more towards a concept of individualism and rusticity. William Gilpin's work was a direct challenge to the ideology of the well established Grand Tour, showing how an exploration of rural Britain could compete with classically-oriented tours of the Continent.Glenn Hooper (2001). "The Isles/Ireland". In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. The irregular, anti-classical ruins became sought-after sights.
Picturesque-hunters
Picturesque-hunters began crowding the Lake District to make sketches using tinted portable mirrors to frame and darken the view, known as claude glass, and named after the 17th century landscape painter Claude Lorrain, whose work William Gilpin saw as synonymous with the picturesque and worthy of emulation. These new tourists had something of the big-game hunter about them and they boasted of their encounters with savage landscapes. Picturesque-hunters tried to "capture" wild scenes, and "fixed" them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them in frames on their drawing room walls.Malcolm Andrews (1989): The Search for the Picturesque, p. 67. Gilpin asked: "shall we suppose it a greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue a trivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties of nature?"
Gilpin differentiated picturesque from the Edmund Burke category of the beautiful in the publication Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape. Gilpin expounded on his experience when traveling the landscape to search for picturesque nature.
In 1815 when Europe was available to travel again after the wars, new fields for picturesque-hunters opened in Italy. Anna Brownell Jameson wrote in 1820: "Had I never visited Italy, I think I should never have understood the word picturesque", while Henry James exclaimed in Albano in the 1870s: "I have talked of the picturesque all my life; now at last I see it".James Buzard: "The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840)". In: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2001), p. 47.
The Far East in the discourse on the picturesque
Though seemingly vague and far away, the Far East, China and Japan, played a considerable role in inspiring a taste for the picturesque. Sir William Temple (1628–1699) was a statesman and essayist who traveled throughout Europe. His essay Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or Of Gardening, in the Year 1685 described what he called the taste of the "Chineses" [sic] for a beauty without order. Among us [Europeans], the beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in some certain proportions, symmetries, or uniformities; our walks and our trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact distances. The Chineses scorn this way of planting, and say, a boy, that can tell an hundred, may plant walks of trees in straight lines, and over-against one another, and to what length and extent he pleases. But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and, though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem. And whoever observes the work upon the best India gowns, or the painting upon their best screens or purcellans, will find their beauty is all of this kind (that is) without order. (1690: 58)
Alexander Pope in a letter of 1724, refers to Temple's Far East: "For as to the hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Paradise of Cyrus, and the Sharawaggi's of China, I have little or no Idea's of 'em"; a few years later Horace Walpole mentions that "I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings, as in grounds or gardens" (1750). Imaginations of Far Eastern irregularity and sharawadgi returns frequently in the eighteenth and nineteenth century discourse.