The Picturesque Tradition and Its Critics

The English clergyman and art theorist William Gilpin gave the picturesque its most influential formulation in a series of illustrated travel books, beginning with Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc., Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1782) and continuing through his Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1792). Gilpin defined the picturesque as a distinct aesthetic category, positioned between Burke's smooth, gradual beautiful and his vast, terrible sublime, and identified with qualities of roughness, variety, irregularity, and intricacy — qualities, he argued, that made a scene fit to be composed into a painting, whether or not it was conventionally beautiful in Burke's sense.