The Picturesque and Landscape Theory
Price developed his ideas with his close neighbour Richard Payne Knight, whose poem 'The Landscape' was published the same year as Price's Essay delineating his theories on "The Picturesque" as a mode of landscape.
Well before Price's Essay or Knight's poem, however, the term 'pictoresque' was used in early 18th century France to refer to a property of being 'in the style of a painter.' Pope, in his "Letter to Caryll", brought the word into English as 'picturesque' in 1712. The term was used by various English authors throughout the 18th century (cf. Oxford English Dictionary 'picturesque') before being described by Bagehot in Literary Studies (1879) as "a quality distinct from that of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur."
For Price, the Picturesque was more specifically defined as being located between the Beautiful and the Sublime. In practical application this meant that his preferred mode of landscaping was to retain old trees, rutted paths, and textured slopes, rather than to sweep all these away in the style that had been practised by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. Price contested, for example, the obsession of "The Beautiful" with Classical and natural symmetry, arguing instead for a less formal and more asymmetrical interpretation of nature.
Price's ideas caught fire and led to much debate in artistic and literary circles: they were parodied, for example, by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Price republished the Essay several times, with additional material, and entered into a public debate with Humphry Repton over the latter's approach to landscape design. He similarly fell out with Payne Knight, whose theories of landscape betrayed a more esoteric attitude.
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Famous quotes containing the words picturesque, landscape and/or theory:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
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“We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;—and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)