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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. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770'', a practical book which instructed England's leisured travellers 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 understood in relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: the '' beautiful'' and the ''sublime''. By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment and rationalist ideas about aesthetics were being challenged by looking at the experiences of beauty and sublimity as non-rational. Aesthetic experience was not just a rational decision – one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beauti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Gilpin (priest)
William Gilpin (4 June 1724 – 5 April 1804) was an English artist, Church of England cleric, schoolmaster and author. He is best known as a travel writer and as one of those who originated the idea of the picturesque.Malcolm Andrews"Gilpin, William (1724–1804)"''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography''. Retrieved 20 March 2016 Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004, pay-walled. Life Gilpin was born in Cumberland, the son of Captain John Bernard Gilpin, a soldier and amateur artist. From an early age he was an enthusiastic sketcher and collector of prints, but while his brother Sawrey Gilpin became a professional painter, William opted for a career in the church, graduating from Queen's College, Oxford in 1748. While still at Oxford, Gilpin anonymously published ''A Dialogue upon the Gardens... at Stow in Buckinghamshire'' (1748). Part guidebook to Stowe, part essay on aesthetics, it shows that Gilpin had already begun to develop his ideas on the picturesque. Unusually for the time, Gilpin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
