Borrowed Scenery - Ties Between borrowed Scenery and The Picturesque Style

Ties Between borrowed Scenery and The Picturesque Style

Temple's development of fashionable "sarawadgi" garden design was followed by Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke suggested a third category including those things which neither inspire awe with the sublime or pleasure with the beautiful. He called it "the picturesque" and qualified it to mean all that cannot fit into the two more rational states evoked by the other categories. A flurry of English authors beginning with William Gilpin and followed by Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price, and Humphrey Repton all called for promotion of the picturesque.

Gilpin wrote prolifically on the merits of touring the countryside of England. The naturally morose, craggy, pastoral, and untouched landscape of northern England and Scotland was a suitable endeavor for the rising middle classes, and Gilpin thought it almost patriotic to travel the homeland instead of the historically elite tour of the great European cities. One of the major commonalities between the precursor borrowed scenery and the later picturesque style movement is the role of travel and its integration in designing one’s home to enhance one's political and social standing. A simple description of the picturesque is the visual qualities of Nature suitable for a picture. However, Lockean philosophy had freed Nature from the ideal forms of allegory and classical pursuits, essentially embracing the imperfections in both landscapes and plants. In this way the idea progressed beyond the study of great landscape painters like Claude Deruet and Nicolas Poussin into experimentation with creating episodic, evocative, and contemplative landscapes in which elements were combined for their total effect as an individual picture.

As the borrowed scenery became a commonplace principle in Japanese gardening and was employed in monasteries, temples, and less noble homes alike it became more of a framing mechanism than a gesture to foreign scenes. Shakkei moved to incorporate the elements of the surrounding lands, such as a mountain in the distance or an ancient grove of trees, as the backdrop for the actual garden, arranging the plantings to highlight the distant view. Like the picturesque style, this was a conscious manipulation of Nature to create foregrounds, middlegrounds, and backgrounds in a move to highlight a selection of provocative formal elements. This improvement or elevation of certain aesthetic qualities is hardly a new phenomenon, as art and philosophy have often progressed hand in hand, but it is unique that an idea was mistakenly diffused (Sharawadgi), which resulted in a typology of gardens that served as a precursor for the picturesque style which actually represented the ideas of sorowaji and shakkei quite accurately. These class-driven aesthetic preferences were driven by nationalistic statements of incorporating goods and scenery from one’s own country, framing mechanisms which dictate the overall experience, and a simultaneous embracing of irregular qualities while manipulating the “natural” scenery to promote them. The importance of this comparison lies in its location at the beginning of modernism and modernization, marking a period in which Nature was allowed to become less mathematically ordered but where intervention was still paramount but could be masked compositionally and just shortly after technologically as in Adolphe Alphand’s Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park.