However, while his brother Sawrey Gilpin became a full-time professional painter,[3] William opted for a career in the church, graduating from Queen's College, Oxford in 1748.

Perhaps influenced by the premature death of his great-uncle, Richard Gilpin (born 1664)“from a blow of his schoolmaster”, he was an enlightened educationalist, instituting a system of fines rather than corporal punishment and encouraging the boys to keep gardens and in-school shops.

"[6] As an educator, he has been compared to his contemporary, David Manson, who in his grammar school in Belfast sought to exclude "drudgery and fear" through the use of play, outdoor activity and peer tutoring.

During the late 1760s and 1770s, Gilpin travelled extensively in the summer holidays and applied his principles to the landscapes he saw, committing his thoughts and spontaneous sketches to notebooks.

Gilpin's tour journals circulated in manuscript to friends such as the poet William Mason and a wider circle including Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole and King George III.

In a much-quoted passage, Gilpin took things to an extreme, suggesting that "a mallet judiciously used" might render the insufficiently ruinous gable of Tintern Abbey more picturesque.

(Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, notably refuses to join Mr. Darcy and the Bingley sisters in a stroll with the teasing observation, "You are charmingly group'd, and... the picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth.")

It was left to others, notably Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price and Thomas Johnes, to develop Gilpin's ideas into more comprehensive theories of the picturesque and apply these more generally to landscape design and architecture.

Ultimately, these grand theories of wild natural beauty gave way to the tamer, more commercialised picturesque of the mid-19th century, though Gilpin's works remained popular and several new editions appeared with additions by John Heaviside Clark.

Gilpin also lives on as the model for the satirist William Combe's clever but cruel Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1809), brilliantly illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson.

As well as his picturesque writing, Gilpin published several works on moral and religious subjects, including biographies of Hugh Latimer, Thomas Cranmer and John Wycliffe.