What was the relationship between the picturesque and British colonial violence at the turn of the nineteenth century? Kim Ian Michasiw anticipated such a query in a footnote to his 1992 essay, ‘Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque’, wherein he pondered a ‘troubling possibility’: that the ‘vocabulary units’ and ‘something of the discourse’s syntax may well have determined the approach of certain specific imperial agents to their tasks’ – tasks that resulted in damage. Michasiw implicated class in the matter of colonial violence, but here damage itself is the primary concern, produced and observed firsthand by British amateur artists in the forms of epistemic and material violence. Like Michasiw, I have been considering the ideas of eighteenth-century clergyman and schoolmaster William Gilpin relative to the colonial picturesque. It is, of course, widely acknowledged that Gilpin revealed his desire to take a mallet to Tintern Abbey in Observations on the River Wye in order to make it a more aesthetically satisfying ruin. As such, he has provoked scholars to consider a relationship between the picturesque and material violence. But more than this, Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye encouraged domestic as well as colonial travellers to view land and people in ways that stretched well beyond the aesthetic and into historical, political, and economic realms. In this brief, exploratory essay, which is part of a larger project engaged in theorising violence in colonial Ceylon and postcolonial Sri Lanka, Gilpin’s book is considered vis-a-vis text and imagery by practitioners of the picturesque who lived, worked in, or travelled to Ceylon during the period of British conquest, from 1796 through 1818. I argue that Gilpin’s published musings along the Wye provided an effective lens through which his imitators could envision an expanding empire as the British contended with the Dutch and Sinhalese for political, economic, and cultural dominance of the island. Extant accounts by British soldiers, civil servants, artists, missionaries, and Orientalists produced during the period of British conquest reveal a preoccupation with material violence on the island. Death as a result of war dominates such descriptions, but these accounts are replete as well with references to corporal punishment and military execution, rape, spousal abuse, civilian impressment and harassment, the killing of animals, destruction of provisions and property, and the alteration of landscape. Not surprisingly, interwoven with this discursive fabric of violence are numerous rhetorical strategies of comfort. These rely on metropolitan ideals of liberation, national honour, security, property, civic improvement, sport, and picturesque beauty. The last of these – the picturesque – is the strategy of