Sir Uvedale Price, 1st Baronet

Sir Uvedale Price, 1st Baronet (baptised 14 April 1747 – 14 September 1829), author of the Essay on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and The Beautiful (1794), was a Herefordshire landowner who was at the heart of the 'Picturesque debate' of the 1790s.

As a young man Price was a figure on London's social scene, and was once described as the "macaroni of his age," but with his inheritance and his marriage to Lady Caroline Carpenter, youngest daughter of George Carpenter, 1st Earl of Tyrconnel,[1] he settled down at Foxley to tend to the estate and develop his theories on landscape, as well as equally controversial work on the pronunciation of the Classical languages.

He was also a lifetime friend of the statesman Charles James Fox as well as being acquainted with William Wordsworth, and in later life, a correspondent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

[3] In practical application this meant that his preferred mode of landscaping was to retain old trees, rutted paths, and textured slopes, rather than to sweep all these away in the style that had been practised by Lancelot "Capability" Brown.

Price republished the Essay several times, with additional material, and entered into a public debate with Humphry Repton over the latter's approach to landscape design.