John Ruskin, Claude Lorrain, Robert Smithson, Christopher Tunnard, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Yve-Alain Bois walked into a bar . .

Abstract

John Ruskin, Claude Lorrain, Robert Smithson, Christopher Tunnard, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Yve-Alain Bois walked into a bar . . John Dixon Hunt (bio) . . . for a conversazione on the modernity of the picturesque. Everybody knows Ruskin, though few read him; Lorrain was a famous painter and was responsible (though it was not his fault) for being imitated by painters and gardeners throughout the eighteenth century; Smithson, who died in 1973, was a famous land artist and writer; Tunnard, who wrote on modern gardening and tried to tie it to its previous history, taught at Harvard and Yale; Pevsner was a modernist architectural critic who was nevertheless fascinated by the picturesque; Bois is a distinguished art historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.1 For Emily Ruskin began by observing, rightly, that “Probably no word in the language (exclusive of theological expressions) has been the subject of so frequent or so prolonged dispute; yet none remain more vague in their acceptance . . .” It was, essentially, a question of how the term, the word “picturesque,” could or should be invoked, given its utter uselessness in the hands of journalism, a bland and empty gesture towards something undefined. So it was a debate about the word. Robert Smithson said it had been “struck by [End Page 81] lightning over the centuries,” but that the topic had been dismissed by “timid academics”; Yve-Alain Bois concurred. Somebody mentioned Salvator Rosa, who was particularly fond of depicting tree trunks split by thunderbolts. Others in the crowd, mainly landscape architects, muttered that such aged and rotten trunks should be felled, pulped and used for fertilisers. But the vagueness—not to say the hostility—was countered by citing certain issues from the very beginning of the picturesque in the later seventeenth century, which the present-day world had neglected. Two related themes were raised, one etymological, the other related to the subject matter of the picturesque. Etymologically, the word had appeared first in northern Italy, and this usage was taken into English by William Aglionby’s Painting Illustrated of 1685, where he writes that some Italian painters were “working A la pittoresk, that is boldly.” This was therefore about how the artist worked—choosing relevant natural materials (scenery and even human physiognomy)—which could be represented with virile brushwork on the canvas or by the burin’s excavation of and printing from the engraved plate. The imagery therefore insisted on its own artifice, on the deliberate refusal of seeing the painting as a “natural” view through a window. A similar attitude was probably in the mind of A. J. Downing in mid-nineteenth century America, when he spoke of the picturesque as “an idea of beauty strongly and irregularly expressed.” Even Ruskin, who was not fond of Thomas Gainsborough, said that Gainsborough was said to have introduced “business for the eye” into his paintings (i.e., busyness, what the enthralled eye would relish in the forms of the paint and brushwork). There was general assent that the picturesque was inclined to relish the rough and unfinished in both subjects and their media; fragments were seized as part of the picturesque effect, since they reflected the effects of time, the time of both the artist’s activity and the evidence of temporal disruption and decay. Fragments found in natural terrain were especially admired: Smithson said it was exactly [End Page 82] this notion in Uvedale Price’s verbal description of a torn and fractured landscape that he had admired in Three Essays on the Picturesque: The side of a smooth green hill, torn by floods, may at first very properly be called deformed, and on the same principle, though not with the same impression, as a gash on a living animal. When a rawness of such a gash in the ground is softened, and in part concealed and ornamented by the effects of time, and the progress of vegetation, deformity, by this usual process, is converted into picturesqueness; and this is the case with quarries, gravel pits, etc., which at first are deformities, and which in their most picturesque state, are often considered as such by a levelling improver. But time was also a key element of the picturesque, since...