Variations on the Picturesque: Authority, Play, and Practice

Abstract

DRAWING UPON recent scholarship in the study of travel, gender, science, colonialism, space, and medical discourse, our collection of essays offers an expansive and innovative revaluation of the picturesque. Although in contemporary parlance the term ‘‘picturesque’’ has been diminished to mean something like ‘‘appropriate for a postcard,’’ during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it invoked a contested field of aesthetic theory and practices, and it exerted a complex and extensive influence upon wide-ranging cultural activities such as poetry, fiction, landscape improvement, gardening, tourism, ecology, and politics. The picturesque was foremost (and remains today among art historians and literary scholars) a subject of theoretical controversy. During the eighteenth century, landowners, writers, landscape architects, and politicians argued over the political and ecological implications of this aesthetic with an almost apocalyptic fervor, as when Horace Walpole exclaimed that Richard Payne Knight, a prominent picturesque theorist of the 1790s, was a ‘‘Tom Paine’’ who would ‘‘Jacobinically’’ level the ‘‘purity’’ of English gardens (Lewis 339). These theories of landscape were then translated into a living aesthetic which gave rise to many new spatial and visual practices, including the rise of tourism as we know it today and, as Jonathan Bate has recently argued, the conservation movement (132). As a motivating and framing device for the hundreds of travelers who personalized the land and their relationship to it by visiting popular sites throughout Britain, the picturesque functioned as a propaedeutic in visual literacy, helping the tourist to make sense of his or her own perceptions. As William Gilpin suggested, the picturesque enlightened the ‘‘cold, untutored eye’’ (Observations II: 12). When used by writers of the period, the picturesque offered a seemingly boundless paradigm for exploring the complexities of representation itself. Moreover, using picturesque principles of landscape design, landscape architects throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries imprinted a recognizable pattern on millions of acres across several continents, in settings as various as England’s Blenheim Palace and New York City’s Central Park. Finally, the picturesque became a point of intersection in discussions of science, ecology, theories of association, and the psychology of perception. Whereas many earlier collections of essays such as Stephen Copley and Peter Garside’s The Politics of the Picturesque and W. J. T. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power generally identify