picturesque

1. Of, suggesting, or suitable for a picture: picturesque rocky shores.
2. Striking or interesting in an unusual way; irregularly or quaintly attractive: a picturesque French café.
3. Strikingly expressive or vivid: picturesque language.

[Alteration of French pittoresque, from Italian pittoresco, from pittore, painter, from Latin pictor. See Pictor.]

adjective

1. Evoking strong mental images through distinctiveness: colorful, vivid. See strong/weak.
2. Described verbally in sharp and accurate detail: graphic, lifelike, photographic, pictorial, realistic, vivid. See specific/general, words.

Definition: very attractive (scene)
Antonyms: drab, dull, hideous, ugly, unsightly

Descriptive term that was formulated into an aesthetic category in late 18th-century Britain, with particular application to landscape scenery, landscape painting and garden and park design. The leading characteristics of picturesque landscape are irregularity, roughness and variety, and the more wild areas of the British Isles, which it was then thought best exhibited such characteristics, were frequently visited and minutely examined by those tourists who followed the cult of the Picturesque.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

For more information on picturesque, visit Britannica.com.

C18 English aesthetic category that was hugely influential throughout Europe. It was a standard of taste, largely concerned with landscape, and with emotional responses to associations evocative of passions or events. From Pittoresco (‘in the manner of the painters’), it was also associated with carefully contrived landscape paintings, particularly those of Claude Lorraine (1600–82), Salvator Rosa (1615–73), and the two Poussins (1615–75 and 1593–1665). It was essentially an anti-urban aesthetic concerned with sensibility, linked to notions of pleasing the eye with compositions reminiscent of those in paintings. To Sir Uvedale Price the Picturesque comprised all the qualities of nature and art that could be discerned in paintings executed since the time of Titian (c.1485–1576), and he argued in his Essay on the Picturesque (1794) in favour of ‘natural’ beauty, deploring contemporary fashions, such as those established by ‘Capability’ Brown for laying out grounds, because they were at variance with all the principles of landscape-painting. Price's arguments were set out by Richard Payne Knight in his didactic poem The Landscape (1794), and both men had considerable influence over the design of gardens and landscapes in later years, helping to create a climate in which the asymmetrical and informal aspects of much architectural and landscape design developed in C19. However, Price and Knight also conceded that there was always a place in a Picturesque landscape for formal and symmetrical composition, just as could be seen in many paintings. Picturesque scenes were full of variety, interesting detail, and elements drawn from any sources, so were neither serene (like the Beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime).

In architectural terms, the asymmetrical villas of John Nash, for example, were a product of the Picturesque, and the freeing of architectural composition from the tyranny of symmetry was undoubtedly due to ideas of the Picturesque, a term that suggested variety, smallness, irregularity, roughness of texture, and an association with the power to stimulate imagination. Thus the Picturesque led to eclecticism and, by its appreciation of variety and asymmetry, to the Gothic and other Revivals.

Bibliography

• M. Andrews (ed.) (1994)
• Ballantyne (1997)
• Chilvers Osborne & Farr (eds.) (1988)
• Colvin & J.Harris (eds.) (1970)
• Copley & Garside (eds.) (1995)
• Crook (1987)
• Hunt (1992, 2002)
• Hussey (1967a)
• Knight (1794, 1972)
• H.Osborne (1970)
• Papworth & Placzek (eds.) (1977)
• Pevsner (1968, 1974)
• Price (1810)
• Summerson (ed.) (1993)
• D.Watkin (1982a)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

A term closely linking art and literature, ‘picturesque’ originally meant a natural landscape which looked as if Claude might have painted it. Landscapes of magnificent ruined and overgrown Italian gardens, drawn by Fragonard and Hubert Robert in Rome, and fantastic conceptions of nature reclaiming man-made edifices published in Paris by the Italian Piranesi were taken up as leitmotifs of the resurgent power of nature during the Romantic movement of the 19th c. William Gilpin claimed that picturesque views were rarely found in nature; Richard Payne Knight defined a set of principles for landscape gardening which united beauty and the picturesque in The Landscape: A Didactic Poem, dedicated to the picturesque theorist Sir Uvedale Price. Landscape gardeners of the 18th c. established principles of variety, irregularity, surprise, accident, and interest as new canons of beauty. In France, the marquis de Girardin wrote an admired work, De la composition des paysages, ou Des moyens d'embellir la nature, and put it into practice on his estate at Ermenonville.

[Patsy Campbell]

Use of the term "picturesque" has varied greatly since its emergence in the late seventeenth century, and its meaning has been frequently disputed. Ostensibly derived from the Italian pittoresco or the French pittoresque, meaning "like a picture" or "as if by a painter," the English version exceeded those meanings even in its earliest usage. For example, in notes to his translation of Homer's Iliad (1715–1720), the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) used the word "picturesque" to signal descriptive passages that, when visualized, were particularly compelling. Until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the term generally implied that the subject in question was to some degree in keeping with conventions of painting. However, that conformity might be deliberate or by chance and, consequently, the expression was equally applicable to designed and natural subjects: gardens and remote wilderness, artful compositions and haphazard arrangements, brushstrokes within a painting, and even paintings themselves.

During the last third of the eighteenth century, the meaning of "picturesque" became a major subject of debate among three theorists particularly interested in landscape: William Gilpin (1724–1804), Uvedale Price (1747–1829), and Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824). Central to the debate were questions about how and where aesthetic properties were constituted.

Gilpin was a rural schoolmaster and clergyman who believed that aesthetic qualities were based on objective properties. He argued that the "picturesque"—defined in his Essay on Prints (1768) as "expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture"—referred to compositional formulas and textures such as those found in the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), Gaspard Dughet (called Poussin; 1615–1675), and Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), in which an open area seen from a low viewpoint was backed by a screening device and framed on both sides by wings, all painted in rough brushstrokes. Gilpin popularized his theory through a series of travel guides, published beginning in 1782, in which he pinpointed places from which to view "picturesque" scenes within rural landscape.

Price and Knight looked not to rustic scenery but to estate landscapes in their appraisals of the picturesque. Like Gilpin, Price believed that aesthetic qualities were objective properties. Influenced by Edmund Burke's treatise, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; revised 1759), however, Price also believed that perception of specific forms and textures could elicit specific thoughts and feelings within the mind of an observer. In his Essay on the Picturesque (1794), Price described the picturesque as an aesthetic category in which perceptions of roughness, irregularity, and unexpected variety could produce sensations of curiosity and pleasure. In "The Landscape" (1794), a poem dedicated to Price, and later in his substantial Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), Knight differed from Gilpin and Price by suggesting that the picturesque was defined not by objective properties but by a mode of perception. More specifically, Knight proposed that the picturesque was an understanding produced in the mind of the observer through the association of ideas, and that individuals with higher levels of cultural education would be more inclined to experience it.

Despite theoretical uncertainties, the practice of configuring real space to resemble paintings became a vital aspect of garden and landscape design in eighteenth-century Britain, particularly in the work of William Kent (1685–1748), William Shenstone (1714–1763), and Lancelot "Capability" Brown (1715–1783). Price and Knight severely disapproved of Brown's untextured designs and hoped, through their writings, to foster appreciation among estate owners of more variegated, "patinated" landscapes. On the Continent, picturesque composition played an important role in the emergence and development of irregular design, beginning in the 1760s in France and, subsequently, in countries as far separated as Italy and Russia.

Bibliography

Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800. Stanford, 1989.

Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. Berkeley, 1986.

Hunt, John Dixon. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. New York, 2002.

Hussey, Christopher. The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View. London, 1927. Reprint, London, 1967.

Price, Martin. "The Picturesque Moment." In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, pp. 259–292. New York, 1965.

—DAVID L. HAYS

Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal first 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 travelers 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 explained in terms of its relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: those of the beautiful and the sublime. By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment rationalist ideas about aestheticism were being challenged by looking at the experiences of beauty and sublimity as being non-rational (instinctual). Aesthetic experience was not just a rational decision - one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beautiful - rather it was a matter of basic human instinct and came naturally. Edmund Burke in his 1756Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful said the soft gentle curves appealed, he thought, to the male sexual desire, while the sublime horrors appealed to our desires for self-preservation.^[1] Picturesque arose as a mediator between the opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, showing the possibilities that existed in between these two rationally idealized states. As Thomas Gray wrote in 1765 of the Scottish Highlands "The mountains are ecstatic.. None but.. God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror." ^[1]. See also Gilpin and the picturesque.

Contents 1 Background 2 Notable works 3 References 4 See also 5 External links

Background

The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window by J. M. W. Turner, 1794

During the mid 18th century the idea of purely scenic pleasure touring began to take hold among the English leisured class. 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.^[2] The irregular, anti-classical, ruins and even ruined people - the ragged poor (viewed from a safe distance of course) - became sought after themes. Can-tinted portable mirrors to frame and darken the scenes they visited, it was named after 17th century landscape painter Claude Lorrain whose work Gilpin saw as synonymous with the picturesque and who Gilpin encouraged emulation. As Malcolm Andrews remarks, there is "something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, "capturing" wild scenes, and "fixing" them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing room walls".^[2] Gilpin himself 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?"^[2] After 1815 when Europe was available to travel again after the wars, new fields for picturesque-hunters opened up in Italy. Anna James wrote in 1820 "Had I never visited Italy, I think I should never have understood the word picturesque".^[1] Henry James exclaimed in Albano in the 1870s "I have talked of the picturesque all my life; now at last.. I see it".^[1].

Picturesque tourists were also encouraged to reshape the landscapes as settings for English country houses, exemplified by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. Following Gilpin's advice, many landowners began designing gardens with irregular sight lines and prefabricated ruins of 'classical' structures.

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 an Italian term pittoresco, meaning, "in the manner of a painter," William Gilpin's Essay on Prints (1768) defined picturesque as " ... a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture" (xii).

Notable works

• Gilpin's 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.
• Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, soon followed, and went into several editions that the author revised and expanded.
• A third great essay on the Picturesque was 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.
• Dorothy Wordsworth wrote Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803 (1874) considered a classic of picturesque travel writing.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• In modern times, the essay by the English architectural historian 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.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} James Buzard (2001). "The Grand Tour and after (1660-1840)". In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.
2. ^ ^{a b c} Glenn Hooper (2001). "The Isles/Ireland". In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.

See also

• Grand Tour
• Landscape painting
• Context theory
• Edinburgh
• Planting design
• Wye Valley
• John Dixon Hunt

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.

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Dansk (Danish)
adj. - malerisk, malende

Nederlands (Dutch)
pittoresk, beeldend, treffend

Français (French)
adj. - pittoresque

Deutsch (German)
adj. - malerisch

Ελληνική (Greek)
adj. - γραφικός

Italiano (Italian)
pittoresco

Português (Portuguese)
adj. - pitoresco

Русский (Russian)
живописный

Español (Spanish)
adj. - pintoresco

Svenska (Swedish)
adj. - pittoresk, målande

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
生动的, 独特的, 如画的

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 生動的, 獨特的, 如畫的

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 그림 같은, 생기 있는, 독창적인

日本語 (Japanese)
adj. - 絵のような, 生きいきした, 生き生きした

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(صفه) بديع, رائع, جدير بالتصوير, مثير للصورة الذهنيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮ציורי, יפה, ראוי לציור, יוצא-דופן, מוזר, מלא-חיים (תמונה)‬

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