Landscape and the Picturesque

A seventeenth-century Italian painter, Rosa is best remembered for his rugged landscapes, which contributed to the development of the picturesque aesthetic.

William Gilpin, in his influential writings on the subject, presented the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain’s work as a paradigmatic example of the picturesque.

In the text excerpted here, philosopher and political figure Edmund Burke (1730–97) advances an influential definition of the sublime as an aesthetic category distinct from the beautiful. 

from Part 2

Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.

The Sublime and Beautiful Compared

… [S]ublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions. In the infinite variety of natural combinations, we must expect to find the qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other united in the same object. We must expect also to find combinations of the same kind in the works of art. But when we consider the power of an object upon our passions, we must know that when anything is intended to affect the mind by the force of some predominant property, the affection produced is like to be the more uniform and perfect, if all the other properties or qualities of the object be of the same nature, and tending to the same design, as the principal.

William Gilpin (1724–1804) articulated the picturesque as “that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture” in his Essay on Prints (1768). In Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, he further refines and explores the concept.

from Essay 1

Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque—between those, which please the eye in their natural state; and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated by painting.

Ideas of beauty vary with the objects, and with the eye of the spectator. The stonemason sees beauties in a well-jointed wall, which escape the architect, who surveys the building under a different idea. And thus the painter, who compares his object with the rules of his art, sees it in a different light from the man of general taste, who surveys it only as simply beautiful.

As this difference therefore between the beautiful, and the picturesque appears really to exist, and must depend on some peculiar construction of the object; it may be worthwhile to examine, what that peculiar construction is. We inquire not into the general sources of beauty, either in nature, or in representation. This would lead into a nice, and scientific discussion, in which it is not our purpose to engage. The question simply is, What is that quality in objects, which particularly marks them as picturesque?

In examining the real object, we shall find, one source of beauty arises from that species of elegance, which we call smoothness, or neatness; for the terms are nearly synonymous. The higher the marble is polished, the brighter the silver is rubbed, and the more the mahogany shines, the more each is considered as an object of beauty: as if the eye delighted in gliding smoothly over a surface.

In the class of larger objects the same idea prevails. In a pile of building we wish to see neatness in every part added to the elegance of the architecture. And if we examine a piece of improved pleasure-ground, every thing rough, and slovenly offends.

Mr. Burke, enumerating the properties of beauty, considers smoothness as one of the most essential. “A very considerable part of the effect of beauty, says he, is owing to this quality: indeed the most considerable: for take any beautiful object, and give it a broken, and rugged surface, and however well-formed it may be in other respects, it pleases no longer. Whereas, let it want ever so many of the other constituents, if it want not this, it becomes more pleasing, than almost all the others without it.” How far Mr. Burke may be right in making smoothness the most considerable source of beauty, I rather doubt. A considerable one it certainly is. Thus then, we suppose, the matter stands with regard to beautiful objects in general. But in picturesque representation it seems somewhat odd, yet perhaps we shall find it equally true, that the reverse of this is the case; and that the ideas of neat and smooth, instead of being picturesque, in reality strip the object, in which they reside, of all pretensions to picturesque beauty. Nay, farther, we do not scruple to assert, that roughness forms the most essential point of difference between the beautiful, and the picturesque; as it seems to be that particular quality, which makes objects chiefly pleasing in painting. I use the general term roughness; but properly speaking roughness relates only to the surface of bodies: when we speak of their delineation, we use the word ruggedness. Both ideas however equally enter into the picturesque; and both are observable in the smaller, as well as in the larger parts of nature—in the outline, and bark of a tree, as in the rude summit, and craggy sides of a mountain. Let us then examine our theory by an appeal to experience; and try how far these qualities enter into the idea of picturesque beauty; and how far they mark that difference among objects, which is the ground of our inquiry.

A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree. The proportion of its parts—the propriety of its ornaments—and the symmetry of the whole may be highly pleasing. But if we introduce it in a picture, it immediately becomes a formal object, and ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel; we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps. In short, from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin. No painter, who had the choice of the two objects, would hesitate which to choose.

Again, why does an elegant piece of garden-ground make no figure on canvas? The shape is pleasing; the combination of the objects, harmonious; and the widening of the walk in the very line of beauty. All this is true, but the smoothness of the whole, though right, and as it should be in nature, offends in picture. Turn the lawn into a piece of broken ground: plant rugged oaks instead of flowing shrubs: break the edges of the walk: give it the rudeness of a road; mark it with wheel-tracks; and scatter around a few stones, and brushwood; in a word, instead of making the whole smooth, make it rough; and you make it also picturesque. All the other ingredients of beauty it already possessed. …

This sketch depicts a gentleman viewing a landscape through a Claude glass, a tool that became popular during the latter half of the eighteenth century among artists and tourists as a means of enhancing one’s appreciation of a landscape. A Claude glass was a mirror, usually round or oval. To use one, a viewer would stand facing away from the landscape and view the scenery reflected in the mirror. As Gilpin, who advocated the use of the glasses, observed, some were tinted so as to produce a “soft, mellow tinge” similar to the color palette characteristic of Claude Lorrain’s landscape paintings.

In the text accompanying these images, Gilpin writes the following:

What is more beautiful, for instance, on a rugged foreground, than on old tree with a hollow trunk? or with a dead arm, a drooping bough, or a dying branch? all which phrases, I apprehend are nearly synonymous.

From the withered top also great use, and beauty may result in the composition of landscape. … The withered top just breaks the lines of an eminence: the curtailed trunk discovers the whole: while the lateral branches, which are vigorous, and healthy in both, hide any part of the lower landscape, which wanting variety, is better veiled. …

These splendid remnants of decaying grandeur speak to the imagination in a stile of eloquence, which the stripling cannot reach: they record the history of some storm, some blast of lightning, or other great event, which transfers its grand ideas to the landscape; and in the representation of elevated subjects assists the sublime.

Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829), a baronet and landowner, was an enthusiastic contributor to the development of discourse on the picturesque. His theories were particularly influential in architecture and landscape design.

from Chapter 5 

… As beauty is the most pleasing of all ideas to the human mind, it is very natural that it should be most sought after, and that the name should have been applied to every species of excellence. Mr. Burke has done a great deal towards settling the vague and contradictory ideas which were entertained on that subject, by investigating its principal causes and effects; but as the best things are often perverted to the worst purposes, so his admirable treatise has, perhaps, been one cause of the insipidity which has prevailed under the name of improvement. Few places have any claim to sublimity, and where nature has not given them that character, art is ineffectual; beauty, therefore, is the great object, and improvers have learned, from the highest authority, that two of its principal causes are smoothness, and gradual variation; these qualities are in themselves very seducing, but they are still more so, when applied to the surface of the ground, from its being in every man’s power to produce them; it requires neither taste, nor invention, but merely the mechanical hand and eye of many a common labourer; and he who can make a nice asparagus bed, has one of the most essential qualifications of an improver, and may soon learn the whole mystery of slopes and hanging levels.

If the principles of the beautiful, according to Mr. Burke, and those of the picturesque according to my ideas, be just, it seldom happens that those two qualities are perfectly unmixed; and I believe, it is for want of observing how nature has blended them, and from attempting to make objects beautiful by dint of smoothness and flowing lines, that so much insipidity has arisen. …

Humphry Repton (1752–1818), the most prominent landscape designer of the late eighteenth century, often illustrated the effects of his designs by means of illustrations with flaps a viewer could lift to reveal the improvements. Repton produced these designs for the benefit of the estates’ owners, but he also published collections for broader consumption in which the designs were presented as examples displaying his general principles; the images here appeared in one such collection. These images are of a landscape before his intervention (with the flaps closed) and afterwards, with the flaps lifted to reveal a typical example of the changes Repton often suggested, including the enlargement of the house and the removal of trees “to show more extent of park and prospect.”

Harlestone Hall in Northamptonshire has often been suggested as the estate Austen had in mind when describing Mansfield Park. Harlestone was also “improved” by the landscape designer Humphry Repton, who includes this image in his Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening as “a specimen of the combined arts of Landscape Gardening and Architecture, in adapting the improvement to the original Character of the Place.” In the accompanying text, Repton writes that

The House was formerly approached and entered in the south front, which was encumbered by stables and farm yards: the road came through the village, and there was a large pool in front: this pool has been changed to an apparent river, and the stables have been removed. An ample Garden has been placed behind the house; the centre of the south front has been taken down, and a bow added with pilasters in the style of the house: the entrance is changed from the south to the north side, and some new rooms to the west have been added.

from Chapter 7: Farm and Park Distinct Objects—Beauty and Profit Seldom Compatible

… The chief beauty of a park consists in uniform verdure; undulating lines contrasting with each other in variety of forms; trees so grouped as to produce light and shade to display the varied surface of the ground; and an undivided range of pasture. The animals fed in such a park appear free from confinement, at liberty to collect their food from the rich herbage of the valley, and to range uncontrolled to the drier soil of the hills.

The farm, on the contrary, is forever changing the colour of its surface in motley and discordant hues; it is subdivided by straight lines of fences. The trees can only be ranged in formal rows along the hedges; and these the farmer claims a right to cut, prune, and disfigure. Instead of cattle enlivening the scene by their peaceful attitudes or sportive gambols, animals are bending beneath the yoke or closely confined to fatten within narrow enclosures, objects of profit, not of beauty. …

… The difficulty of uniting a park and a farm arises from this material circumstance, that the one is an object of beauty, the other of profit. The scenery of both consists of ground, trees, water, and cattle; but these are very differently arranged. And since a park is less profitable than arable land, the more we can diminish the quantity of the former, provided it still be in character with the style of the mansion, the less we shall regret the sacrifice of profit to beauty.

The shape and colour of corn-fields and the straight lines of fences are so totally at variance with all ideas of picturesque beauty that I shall not venture to suggest any hints on the subject of a farm as an ornament; yet I think there might be a distinction made between the farm of a tenant, who must derive benefit from every part of his land, and that occupied by a gentleman for the purposes of amusement or experiment. …

In the following excerpts from his long poem The Task, William Cowper (1731–1800) addresses the vogue for “improvements” to the grounds of estates. Austen was a great admirer of Cowper’s work, and Fanny Price quotes from the first of these passages in Mansfield Park.

from Book 1: The Sofa

Ye fallen avenues! once more I mourn
Your fate unmerited, once more rejoice
That yet a remnant of your race survives.
How airy and how light the graceful arch,
Yet awful as the consecrated roof
Re-echoing pious anthems! while, beneath,
The chequered earth seems restless as a flood
Brushed by the wind. So sportive is the light
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,
And darkening and enlightening, as the leaves
Play wanton, every moment, every spot. …

from Book 3: The Garden

… [W]ere not madness in the head
And folly in the heart; were England now
What England was, plain, hospitable, kind,
And undebauch’d.  But we have bid farewell
To all the virtues of those better days,
And all their honest pleasures.  Mansions once
Knew their own masters, and laborious hands
That had surviv’d the father, serv’d the son.
Now the legitimate and rightful lord
Is but a transient guest, newly arrived
And soon to be supplanted.  He that saw
His patrimonial timber cast its leaf,
Sells the last scantling, and transfers the price
To some shrew’d sharper, ’ere it buds again.
Estates are landscapes, gazed upon awhile,
Then advertis’d, and auctioneer’d away.
The country starves, and they that feed th’ o’ercharged
And surfeited lew’d town with her fair dues,
By a just judgment strip and starve themselves.
The wings that waft our riches out of sight
Grow on the gamester’s elbows, and th’ alert
And nimble motion of those restless joints,
That never tire, soon fans them all away.
Improvement too, the idol of the age,
Is fed with many a victim. Lo! he comes—
The omnipotent magician, Brown appears.
Down falls the venerable pile, th’ abode
Of our forefathers, a grave whisker’d race,
But tasteless. Springs a palace in its stead,
But in a distant spot; where more expos’d
It may enjoy th’ advantage of the north
And agueish East, till time shall have transform’d
Those naked acres to a shelt’ring grove.
He speaks. The lake in front becomes a lawn,
Woods vanish, hills subside, and vallies rise,
And streams as if created for his use,
Pursue the track of his directing wand
Sinuous or strait, now rapid and now slow,
Now murm’ring soft, now roaring in cascades
Ev’n as he bids. Th’ enraptur’d owner smiles.
’Tis finished. And yet finish’d as it seems,
Still wants a grace, the loveliest it could show,
A mine to satisfy th’ enormous cost. …

Although Austen did not visit it until a few years after she first submitted Northanger Abbey for publication, Stoneleigh Abbey has been suggested as a model for the titular setting; like Northanger, it was once a medieval abbey but had been largely transformed into a comfortable eighteenth-century estate. It has also been observed that many attributes of Stoneleigh are strongly paralleled in Austen’s descriptions of Sotherton Court, Mr. Rushworth’s estate in Mansfield Park.

Chatsworth House is often suggested as a possible model for Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s estate in Pride and Prejudice. The illustration appearing here is taken from a guide book for tourists visiting the region.

This painting predates changes to the estate made by the famous landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown in the mid-eighteenth century, but displays the extent of the estate and its situation in the countryside.

This illustration of Steventon Parsonage, Austen’s home from her birth until 1801, was created decades after the building itself was demolished, and its degree of accuracy is uncertain.

Knightley, a surname Austen uses in Emma, was the name of a real upper-class family; their estate, Offchurch Bury, is depicted here.