Picturesque

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.

"[2] 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).

[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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

[14] E. V. Gatenby (1931) proposed English sharawadgi derived from Japanese sorowaji (揃わじ) "not being regular", an older form of sorowazu (揃わず) "incomplete; unequal (in size); uneven; irregular".

[15] S. Lang and Nikolaus Pevsner (1949) dismissed these two unattested Chinese terms, doubted the Japanese sorowaji, and suggested that Temple coined the word "sharawadgi" himself.

Ciaran Murray emphasizes that Temple used "the Chineses" in blanket reference inclusive of all Oriental races during a time when the East-West dialogues and influences were quite fluid.

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.

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.

However, Lockean philosophy had freed Nature from the ideal forms of allegory and classical pursuits, essentially embracing the imperfections in both landscapes and plants.

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 Humphrey Repton.