Picturesque is an
aesthetic
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed th ...
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
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
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
Beautiful, an adjective used to describe things as possessing beauty, may refer to:
Film and theater
* ''Beautiful'' (2000 film), an American film directed by Sally Field
* ''Beautiful'' (2008 film), a South Korean film directed by Juhn Jai-h ...
'' and the ''
sublime''. By the last third of the 18th century,
Enlightenment and
rationalist ideas about
aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...
were being challenged by looking at the experiences of beauty and sublimity as non-rational. Aesthetic
experience
Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these conscious processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involv ...
was not just a rational decision – one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beautiful; rather it came naturally as a matter of basic human instinct.
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (; 12 January NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS">New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS/nowiki>_1729_–_9_July_1797)_was_an_ NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style"> ...
in his 1757 ''
into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful">A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful'' argued that the soft gentle curves appealed to the male sexual desire, while the sublime horrors appealed to our desires for self-preservation. Picturesque arose as a mediator between these opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, showing the possibilities that existed between these two rationally idealised states. As
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet, letter-writer, classics, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his ''Elegy Written in a Country ...
wrote in 1765 of the Scottish Highlands: "The mountains are ecstatic
None but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror."
Historical background and development
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). The word is applied to the manner of depicting a subject in painting, roughly in the sense of "non-classical" or "painted non-academically" in a similar way as Dutch painters discussed developments in painting in the seventeenth century as "painter-like" (''schilder-achtig''). Highly instrumental in the establishing of a taste for the picturesque in northern Europe was landscape painting, in which indeed the realism of the Dutch played a significant role. This cannot be seen separate from other developments in Europe.
Claude Lorrain
Claude Lorrain (; born Claude Gellée , called ''le Lorrain'' in French; traditionally just Claude in English; c. 1600 – 23 November 1682) was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in It ...
(1604–1682) was a well-known French painter, who had developed landscape painting in Rome, like
Poussin
Nicolas Poussin (, , ; June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was the leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for ...
(1594–1665). Both painters worked in a kind of stiff, mannered style, with a focus on archaeological remains and towering pine trees, followed by several Dutchmen who had also traveled to Rome. Soon, deviating from the classical ideal of perfection in beauty epitomized by healthy, towering trees, landscape painters came to discover the sublimity of the withered old tree; the two withered oaks by
Jan van Goyen
Jan Josephszoon van Goyen (; 13 January 1596 – 27 April 1656) was a Dutch landscape painter. The scope of his landscape subjects was very broad as he painted forest landscapesm marines, river landscapes, beach scenes, winter landscape, cityscap ...
(1641) are a well-known example. 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
Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael (; 1629 – 10 March 1682) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman, and etcher. He is generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a period of great wealth and cultural ach ...
. This painter painted picturesque garden scenes that can be seen as early representations of picturesque gardens in Europe. Similar landscape naturalism in English gardens emerged within cultural spheres around
William and Mary
William and Mary often refers to:
* The joint reign of William III of England (II of Scotland) and Mary II of England (and Scotland)
* William and Mary style, a furniture design common from 1700 to 1725 named for the couple
William and Mary may ...
from which the discussion on the picturesque in the English landscape took hold.
In England the word ''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 French ''pittoresque'' and the Italian ''pittoresco''. Gilpin's ''Essay on Prints'' (1768) defined ''picturesque'' as "a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture" (p. xii).
The pictorial genre called "Picturesque" appeared in the 17th century and flourished in the 18th. As well as portraying beauty in the classical manner, eighteenth-century artists could overdo it from top to bottom. Their pre-Romantic sensitivity could aspire to the sublime or be pleased with the picturesque. 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 first option is the harmonic and classical (i. e. beauty); the second, the grandiose and terrifying (i. e. the sublime); and the third, the rustic, corresponding to the picturesque and connecting qualities of the first two options. This triple definition by Hussey, although modern, is true to the concept of the epoch, as
Uvedale Price
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 ' Picturesq ...
explained in 1794. The examples Price gave for these three aesthetic tendencies were
Handel's music as the sublime, a pastorale by
Arcangelo Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli (, also , , ; 17 February 1653 – 8 January 1713) was an Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque era. His music was key in the development of the modern genres of sonata and concerto, in establishing the preeminence of ...
as the beautiful, and a painting of a
Dutch landscape as the picturesque.
During the mid 18th century the idea of purely scenic pleasure touring began to take hold among the English leisured class. This new image disregarded the principles of symmetry and perfect proportions while focusing more on "accidental irregularity," and moving more towards a concept of individualism and rusticity.
William Gilpin's work was a direct challenge to the ideology of the well established
Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the principally 17th- to early 19th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank (typically accompanied by a tuto ...
, showing how an exploration of rural Britain could compete with
classically-oriented tours of the Continent.
[Glenn Hooper (2001). "The Isles/Ireland". In ''The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing''.] The irregular, anti-classical ruins became sought-after sights.
Picturesque-hunters began crowding the
Lake District
The Lake District, also known as the Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous for its lakes, forests, and mountains (or ''fells''), and its associations with William Wordswor ...
to make sketches using
Claude Glasses – tinted portable mirrors to frame and darken the view, and named after the 17th century landscape painter
Claude Lorrain
Claude Lorrain (; born Claude Gellée , called ''le Lorrain'' in French; traditionally just Claude in English; c. 1600 – 23 November 1682) was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in It ...
, whose work Gilpin saw as synonymous with the picturesque and worthy of emulation. As Malcolm Andrews remarks, there is "something of the
big-game hunter
Big-game hunting is the hunting of large game animals for meat, commercially valuable by-products (such as horns/ antlers, furs, tusks, bones, body fat/oil, or special organs and contents), trophy/taxidermy, or simply just for recreation ...
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".
[Malcolm Andrews (1989): ''The Search for the Picturesque'', p. 67.] 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?"
After 1815 when Europe was available to travel again after the wars, new fields for picturesque-hunters opened up in Italy.
Anna Jameson
Anna Brownell Jameson (17 May 179417 March 1860) was an Anglo-Irish art historian. Born in Ireland, she migrated to England at the age of four, becoming a well-known British writer and contributor to nineteenth-century thought on a range of su ...
wrote in 1820: "Had I never visited Italy, I think I should never have understood the word ''picturesque''", while
Henry James
Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...
exclaimed in
Albano in the 1870s: "I have talked of the picturesque all my life; now at last… I see it".
The Far East in the discourse on the picturesque
Though seemingly vague and far away, the Far East, China and Japan, played a considerable role in inspiring a taste for the picturesque.
Sir William Temple
Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet (25 April 162827 January 1699) was an English diplomat, statesman and essayist. An important diplomat, he was recalled in 1679, and for a brief period was a leading advisor to Charles II, with whom he then fell ...
(1628–1699) was a statesman and essayist who traveled throughout Europe. His essay ''Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or Of Gardening, in the Year 1685'' described what he called the taste of the "Chineses"
icfor a beauty without order.
Among us uropeans 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. The Chineses scorn this way of planting, and say, a boy, that can tell an hundred, may plant walks of trees in straight lines, and over-against one another, and to what length and extent he pleases. But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and, though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the ''sharawadgi'' is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem. And whoever observes the work upon the best India gowns, or the painting upon their best screens or purcellans, will find their beauty is all of this kind (that is) without order. (1690:58)
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...
in a letter of 1724, refers to Temple's Far East: "For as to the hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Paradise of Cyrus, and the Sharawaggi's of China, I have little or no Idea's of 'em"; a few years later
Horace Walpole
Horatio Walpole (), 4th Earl of Orford (24 September 1717 – 2 March 1797), better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whigs (British political party), Whig politician.
He had Strawb ...
mentions that "I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings, as in grounds or gardens" (1750). Imaginations of Far Eastern irregularity and sharawadgi returns frequently in the eighteenth and nineteenth century discourse.
Multiple authors have attempted to trace the etymology of ''sharawadgi'' to various Chinese and Japanese terms for garden design. Two Chinese authors suggested the Chinese expressions ''saluo guaizhi'' "quality of being impressive or surprising through careless or unorderly grace" (Chang 1930) and ''sanlan waizhi'' "space tastefully enlivened by disorder" (Ch'ien 1940). E. V. Gatenby (1931) proposed English ''
sharawadgi
Sharawadgi or sharawaggi is a style of landscape gardening or architecture in which rigid lines and symmetry are avoided to give the scene an organic, naturalistic appearance. This was supposedly a concept in the Chinese garden, and starting with ...
'' derived from Japanese ''sorowaji'' (揃わじ) "not being regular", an older form of ''sorowazu'' (揃わず) "incomplete; unequal (in size); uneven; irregular". S. Lang and
Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (1 ...
(1949) dismissed these two unattested Chinese terms, doubted the Japanese ''sorowaji'', and suggested that Temple coined the word "sharawadgi" himself. These authors placed Temple's discovery in the context of upcoming ideas on the picturesque. P. Quennell (1968) concurred that the term could not be traced to any Chinese word, and favored the Japanese etymology. Takau Shimada (1997) believed the irregular beauty that Temple admired was more likely characteristic of Japanese gardens, owing to the irregular topography upon which they were built, and compared the Japanese word ''sawarinai'' (触りない) "do not touch; leave things alone". Ciaran Murray (1998, 1999) reasons that Temple heard the word ''sharawadgi'' from
Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
travelers who had visited Japanese gardens, following the
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...
that enters ''Sharawadgi'' without direct definition, excepting a gloss under the Temple quotation. It notes the etymology is "Of unknown origin; Chinese scholars agree that it cannot belong to that language. Temple speaks as if he had himself heard it from travellers". 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. He also wanted to see similarity between ''sharawadgi'' and a supposed southern Japanese
Kyūshū
is the third-largest island of Japan's five main islands and the most southerly of the four largest islands ( i.e. excluding Okinawa). In the past, it has been known as , and . The historical regional name referred to Kyushu and its surround ...
dialect pronunciation ''shorowaji''. Wybe Kuitert, a notable scholar of Japanese garden history placed ''sharawadgi'' conclusively in the discourse that was on in the circles around
Constantijn Huygens
Sir Constantijn Huygens, Lord of Zuilichem ( , , ; 4 September 159628 March 1687), was a Dutch Golden Age poet and composer. He was also secretary to two Princes of Orange: Frederick Henry and William II, and the father of the scientist Ch ...
a good friend of William Temple, tracing the term as the Japanese aesthetic ''share'aji'' (洒落味、しゃれ味) that belonged to applied arts - including garden design.
[Wybe Kuitert "Japanese Art, Aesthetics, and a European discourse - unraveling Sharawadgi" Japan Review 2014 ISSN 0915-0986 (Vol.2]
Online as PDF
Temple misinterpreted wild irregularity, which he characterized as ''sharawadgi'', to be happy circumstance instead of carefully manipulated garden design. His idea of highlighting natural imperfections and spatial inconsistencies was the inspiration for fashioning early 18th-century "''Sharawadgi'' gardens" in England. The most famous example was
William Kent
William Kent (c. 1685 – 12 April 1748) was an English architect, landscape architect, painter and furniture designer of the early 18th century. He began his career as a painter, and became Principal Painter in Ordinary or court painter, bu ...
's "Elysian field" at
Stowe House built around 1738.
Temple's development of fashionable "sharawadgi" garden design was followed by
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (; 12 January NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS">New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS/nowiki>_1729_–_9_July_1797)_was_an_ NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style"> ...
's 1757 ''
''. Burke suggested a third category including those things which neither inspire awe with the sublime or pleasure with the beautiful. He called it "the picturesque" and qualified it to mean all that cannot fit into the two more rational states evoked by the other categories. A flurry of English authors beginning with
William Gilpin and followed by
Richard Payne Knight
Richard Payne Knight (11 February 1751 – 23 April 1824) of Downton Castle in Herefordshire, and of 5 Soho Square,History of Parliament biography London, England, was a classical scholar, connoisseur, archaeologist and numismatist best ...
,
Uvedale Price
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 ' Picturesq ...
, and
Humphrey Repton
Humphry Repton (21 April 1752 – 24 March 1818) was the last great English landscape designer of the eighteenth century, often regarded as the successor to Capability Brown; he also sowed the seeds of the more intricate and eclectic styles of ...
all called for promotion of the picturesque.
Gilpin wrote prolifically on the merits of touring the countryside of England. 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. A simple description of the picturesque is the visual qualities of Nature suitable for a picture. However,
Lockean
John Locke (; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of ...
philosophy had freed Nature from the ideal forms of allegory and classical pursuits, essentially embracing the imperfections in both landscapes and plants. In this way the idea progressed beyond the study of great landscape painters like
Claude Deruet
Claude Deruet (1588–1660) was a famous French Baroque painter of the 17th century, from the city of Nancy.
Biography
Deruet was an apprentice to Jacques Bellange, the official court painter to Charles III, Duke of Lorraine. He was in Rome b ...
and
Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin (, , ; June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was the leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for a ...
into experimentation with creating episodic, evocative, and contemplative landscapes in which elements were combined for their total effect as an individual picture.
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
Humphry Repton (21 April 1752 – 24 March 1818) was the last great English landscape designer of the eighteenth century, often regarded as the successor to Capability Brown; he also sowed the seeds of the more intricate and eclectic styles of ...
. It is unique that an idea on applied design (''Sharawadgi'') was diffused, which resulted in a typology of gardens that served as a precursor for the picturesque style. These aesthetic preferences were driven by nationalistic statements of incorporating goods and scenery from one's own country, framing mechanisms which dictate the overall experience, and a simultaneous embracing of irregular qualities while manipulating the "natural" scenery to promote them. The importance of this comparison lies in its location at the beginning of modernism and modernization, marking a period in which Nature was allowed to become less mathematically ordered but where intervention was still paramount but could be masked compositionally and just shortly after technologically as in Adolphe Alphand's
Parc des Buttes Chaumont
The Parc des Buttes Chaumont () is a public park situated in northeastern Paris, France, in the 19th arrondissement. Occupying , it is the fifth-largest park in Paris, after the Bois de Vincennes, Bois de Boulogne, Parc de la Villette and Tuile ...
and
Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the USA. Olmsted was famous for co- ...
's
Central Park
Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West Side, Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the List of New York City parks, fifth-largest park in the city, covering . It is the most visited urban par ...
.
Notable works
*
William Combe
William Combe (25 March 174219 June 1823) was a British miscellaneous writer. His early life was that of an adventurer, his later was passed chiefly within the "rules" of the King's Bench Prison. He is chiefly remembered as the author of ''Th ...
and
Thomas Rowlandson
Thomas Rowlandson (; 13 July 175721 April 1827) was an English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era, noted for his political satire and social observation. A prolific artist and printmaker, Rowlandson produced both individual social an ...
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.
*
William Gilpin, ''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.
*
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
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. ...
and planting design.
*
Richard Payne Knight
Richard Payne Knight (11 February 1751 – 23 April 1824) of Downton Castle in Herefordshire, and of 5 Soho Square,History of Parliament biography London, England, was a classical scholar, connoisseur, archaeologist and numismatist best ...
, ''An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste,'' soon followed, and went into several editions that the author revised and expanded.
*
Uvedale Price
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 ' Picturesq ...
, ''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.
*
Humphry Repton
Humphry Repton (21 April 1752 – 24 March 1818) was the last great English landscape designer of the eighteenth century, often regarded as the successor to Capability Brown; he also sowed the seeds of the more intricate and eclectic styles of ...
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
Lancelot "Capability" Brown
Lancelot Brown (born c. 1715–16, baptised 30 August 1716 – 6 February 1783), more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English gardener and landscape architect, who remains the most famous figure in the history of the English la ...
and that the background should have a wild and 'natural' character.
*
John Ruskin
John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and pol ...
identified the "picturesque" as a genuinely modern aesthetic category, in ''The Seven Lamps of Architecture.''
*
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (25 December 1771 – 25 January 1855) was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Dorothy Wordsworth had no a ...
wrote ''
Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803
''Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803'' (1874) is a travel memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth about a six-week, 663-mile journey through the Scottish Highlands from August–September 1803 with her brother William Wordsworth and mutua ...
'' (1874) considered a classic of picturesque travel writing.
See also
*
Landscape painting
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view—with its elements arranged into a coherent compo ...
*
Sharawadgi
Sharawadgi or sharawaggi is a style of landscape gardening or architecture in which rigid lines and symmetry are avoided to give the scene an organic, naturalistic appearance. This was supposedly a concept in the Chinese garden, and starting with ...
*
Planting design
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. ...
*
Borrowed scenery
Borrowed scenery (; Japanese: ; Chinese: ) is the principle of "incorporating background landscape into the composition of a garden" found in traditional East Asian garden design. The term borrowing of scenery ("shakkei") is Chinese in origin, an ...
*
Context theory
Prototype theory is a theory of categorization in cognitive science, particularly in psychology and cognitive linguistics, in which there is a graded degree of belonging to a conceptual category, and some members are more central than others. It ...
*
John Dixon Hunt
John Dixon Hunt (born 18 January 1936 in Gloucester) is an English landscape historian, whose academic career began teaching English literature.. He became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and served as the department chair o ...
*
Wye Valley
The Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB; cy, Dyffryn Gwy) is an internationally important protected landscape straddling the border between England and Wales.
The River Wye ( cy, Afon Gwy) is the fourth-longest river in th ...
*
Thomas Johnes
Thomas Johnes FRS (1 September 1748 – 23 April 1816) was a Member of Parliament, landscape architect, farmer, printer, writer and social benefactor. He is best known for his development of the Hafod Estate in Wales.
Johnes was born in Lud ...
References
{{reflist
External links
John Macarthur ''The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities''"Turner's journeys of the imagination" by Keith Waddington. A Masters Thesis at
Concordia University
Concordia University ( French: ''Université Concordia'') is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1974 following the merger of Loyola College and Sir George Williams University, Concordia is one of the t ...
.
1782 introductions
Romanticism