Picturesque
Picturesque is an
The term "picturesque" needs to be understood in relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: the
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).[3] 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).[4] 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.
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
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.[8] 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.[9] The irregular, anti-classical ruins became sought-after sights.
Picturesque-hunters
Picturesque-hunters began crowding the
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.[11]
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".[12]
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)
Multiple authors have attempted to trace the etymology of sharawadgi to various Chinese and Japanese terms for garden design. Two Chinese authors suggested the Chinese expressions saluo guaizhi "quality of being impressive or surprising through careless or unorderly grace" (Chang 1930)
Temple misinterpreted wild irregularity, which he characterized as sharawadgi, to be happy circumstance instead of carefully manipulated garden design. His idea of highlighting natural imperfections and spatial inconsistencies was the inspiration for fashioning early 18th-century "Sharawadgi gardens" in England. The most famous example was William Kent's "Elysian field" at Stowe House built around 1738.
Temple's development of fashionable "sharawadgi" garden design was followed by
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,
The picturesque style in landscape gardening was a conscious manipulation of Nature to create foregrounds, middlegrounds, and backgrounds in a move to highlight a selection of provocative formal elements—in short the later appropriation of
Picturesque architecture
In the 1930s and 1940s the editor
Notable works
- William Combe and Thomas Rowlandson published an 1809 poem with pictures called The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque which was a satire of the ideal and famously skewered Picturesque-hunters.
- William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting was published in London, 1792.
- Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, 1927 focused modern thinking on the development of this approach. The picturesque idea continues to have a profound influence on garden design and planting design.
- Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, soon followed, and went into several editions that the author revised and expanded.
- Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, revised. edition London, 1796.
- Humphry Repton applied picturesque theory to the practice of landscape design. In conjunction with the work of Price and Knight, this led to the 'picturesque theory' that designed landscapes should be composed like landscape paintings with a foreground, a middle ground and a background. Repton believed that the foreground should be the realm of art (with formal geometry and ornamental planting), that the middleground should have a parkland character of the type created by Lancelot "Capability" Brown and that the background should have a wild and 'natural' character.
- John Ruskin identified the "picturesque" as a genuinely modern aesthetic category, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
- Dorothy Wordsworth wrote Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803 (1874) considered a classic of picturesque travel writing.
See also
- Landscape painting
- Sharawadgi
- Planting design
- Borrowed scenery
- Context theory
- John Dixon Hunt
- Wye Valley
- Thomas Johnes
- John P. Macarthur
References
- ^ James Buzard: "The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840)". In: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2001), p. 45.
- ^ Glenn Hooper: "The Isles / Ireland: the wilder shore". In: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2001), p. 176.
- ^ Sohm, Philip (1991). Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, his critics, and their critiques of painterly brush-work in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 88–196.
- JSTOR 3780826.
- S2CID 165427133.
- ^ Richardson, Tim (2011). The Arcadian Friends. London: Penguin Books. pp. 31–32.
- ^ Hussey, Christopher (1927). The picturesque: studies in a point of view. London and New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. p. 16.
- ^ Taylor, Nicholas (1973). The Victorian City: Images and Realities. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 432–433.
- ^ a b Glenn Hooper (2001). "The Isles/Ireland". In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.
- ^ Malcolm Andrews (1989): The Search for the Picturesque, p. 67.
- ISBN 9783110661736.
- ^ James Buzard: "The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840)". In: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2001), p. 47.
- ^ Chang, Y.Z. "A Note on Sharwadgi", Modern Language Notes 45.4 (1930), pp. 221–224.
- ^ Ch'ien, Chung-shu. "China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth Century," Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography 1 (1940), pp. 351–384.
- ^ Gatenby, E. V. "The Influence of Japanese on English", Studies in English Literature 1 (1931), pp. 508–520.
- ^ Lang, S. and Nikolaus Pevsner. "Sir William Temple and Sharawadgi", The Architectural Review, 106 (1949), pp. 391–392.
- ^ Murray, Ciaran (1999). Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature. Austin and Winfield.
- ^ Wybe Kuitert "Japanese Art, Aesthetics, and a European discourse - unraveling Sharawadgi" Japan Review 2014 ISSN 0915-0986 (Vol.27)Online as PDF Archived 2017-03-18 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 9781350320673.
External links
- John Macarthur The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities
- George P. Landow, "Ruskin on the Picturesque"
- "Turner's journeys of the imagination"
- Landscape Style of Repton, Price and Knight
- Pictures and Poetry. Debunking the Bunk: An Examination of Picturesque Influence, by Keith Waddington. A Masters Thesis at Concordia University.