Picturesque Landscaping and Uvedale Price

Japanese Journal of Human Geography 66―6（2014） ‘Nature too wild’ ? : Picturesque Landscaping and Uvedale Price Charles WATKINS University of Nottingham Abstract This paper considers the relevance of the work of Uvedale Price（ 1747―1829） to debates about the relationship between nature, landscape and society. It focusses on the management of gardens and trees and concludes by assessing his influence on nineteenth century ideas of nature, art and landscape. Uvedale Price published his Essay on the Picturesque in 1794. He defined the ‘picturesque’ as an aesthetic category lying somewhere between Edmund Burke’s ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’. He saw the Essay as a practical guide to managing estates and in this it was generally well received. It generated a literary controversy as he set his ideas of the picturesque forcefully against the then established and celebrated national style of landscape gardening practiced and popularised by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Price’s work influenced literary figures such as Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth ; artists such as John Constable and David Cox and landscape gardeners such as Humphry Repton ; John Claudius Loudon and William Sawrey Gilpin. By the mid-nineteenth century picturesque ways of seeing the landscape had become so normal and natural that Uvedale Price’s contribution to the debate began to be forgotten, to be revived by architectural historians in the twentieth century. Key words : nature, picturesque, cultural geography, landscape, gardens, trees, Uvedale Price I Introduction Picturesque aesthetics became one of the most potent and influential ways of interpreting and understanding landscapes and trees in England from the eighteenth century onwards. David Watkin considers that ‘the theory and practice of the Picturesque constitute the major English contribution to European aesthetics’ and that between 1730 and 1830 the ‘Picturesque became the universal mode of vision for the educated classes’ （Watkin 1982, vii）. More recently, John Macarthur has argued that ‘at the moment of its emergence, and faithfully since, the picturesque has provided an ever-refreshing image of a precocious aesthetics’ which infected the arts with an ‘equivocation’ and ‘instability.’（ Macarthur 2007, 1）. And yet the origin of the term and its varied meaning are difficult to pin down. In the 1750s two works were published which, while not using the term picturesque, stimulated considerable debate. William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty （1753） argued that the eye preferred variety and intricacy to symmetry and that ‘those lines which have the most variety themselves, contribute towards the production of beauty.’ His ‘line of beauty’ was not simply a curved line but a ‘precise serpentine line’ which was neither ‘too bulging nor too tapering’（ Hogarth 1754, 52）. This was followed a few years later ― 19 ― 508 Japanese Journal of Human Geography 66―6（2014） by Edmund Burke’s enormously influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful（ 1757）. When Horace Walpole published his The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening in 1780 he linked painting and landscaping explicitly by asking that if ‘we have the seeds of a Claud or a Gaspar amongst us, he must come forth. If wood, water, groves, vallies, glades, can inspire poet or painter, this is the country, this is the age to produce them.’ （Chace 1943, 35―6）. Walpole approved of much contemporary landscaping, including that by the most famous practitioner Capability Brown, although he could not name him as ‘living artists’ were not included in his history. Although he was concerned that ‘the pursuit of variety’ threatened the modern style of gardening, he stressed that ‘In the mean time how rich, how gay, how picturesque the face of the country !’ and that there had been so much improvement brought about by the modern style of gardening that ‘every journey is made through a succession of pictures ….’（ Chace 1943, 25― 27, 31, 35―7）. William Gilpin was the most important and influential writer to spread of the idea of the picturesque in the second half of the eighteenth century, through the publication of his Essay on Prints（ 1768） and his subsequent tour books which offered observations on ‘picturesque beauty.’ Gilpin, who combined a career as school master, vicar, philanthropist, scholar and artist, had first developed his views on the picturesque in an early essay A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stowe （1748）, which characterised it as ‘a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture’（ Gilpin 1768, 2―3）. Gilpin attempted to develop his theory in his Essay on Picturesque Beauty, written in 1776, though criticism from Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom he sent the work in manuscript, compelled him to delay publication until 1792 （Barbier 1963, 101―2）. The general idea was that certain qualities present in nature - roughness and ruggedness, variety and irregularity, chiaroscuro - could combine to form ‘picturesque beauty’ - a phrase that Gilpin admitted was ‘but little understood’, but by which he meant ‘that kind of beauty which would look well in a picture’ （Gilpin 1798, 328）. The fullest exposition of Gilpin’s concept of the picturesque came from his various tours such as the River Wye （Gilpin 1782）. Gilpin’s ambition for these tours was to ‘examine the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty : opening the sources of those pleasures which are derived from the comparison’（ Gilpin 1782, 1）. But the most careful elaboration of picturesque aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century was Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque of 1794 which aimed ‘to shew … that the picturesque has a character not less separate and distinct than either the sublime or the beautiful, nor less independent of the art of painting’（ Price 1810, I : 40 ; Watkins and Cowell, 2012）. For Price, the study of nature and the works of great artists - such as the landscapes of Claude, Salvator Rosa and Poussin but also those of Dutch and Flemish artists such as Ruysdael - was crucial in understanding how to appreciate nature and design gardens, grounds and estates （Figure 1）. His emphasis on connection and local knowledge implicitly validated the authority of informed landowners（ such as Price himself） as those best placed to effect changes to the landscape. ‘He therefore, in my mind,’ wrote Price, ‘will shew most art in improving, who leaves （a very material point） or who creates the greatest variety of landscapes ; … not he who begins his work by general clearing and smoothing, or in other words, by destroying all those accidents of which such advantages might have been made ; but which afterwards, the most enlightened and experienced artist can never hope to restore’（ Price 1810, I : 345）. Price introduced a third category of ‘picturesqueness’ to the Burkean ideas of the beautiful ― 20 ― ‘Nature too wild’ ? : Picturesque Landscaping and Uvedale Price（ WATKINS） 509 and the sublime. This stood for ruggedness, variety, and character, ‘intricacy in the disposition, and variety in the forms, the tints and the lights and shadows of objects … the two opposite qualities of roughness, and of sudden variation, joined to that of irregularity, are the most efficient causes of the picturesque’ （Price 1810, I : 22―3, 50）. According to Price’s definition, ‘the picturesque fills up a vacancy between the sublime and the beautiful, and accounts for the pleasure we receive from many objects, on principles distinct from them both’（ Price 1810, I : 114）. This allowed Price to defend aspects of the landscape that he saw were being cleared away by the mania for improvement : ‘old neglected bye roads and hollow ways’, ‘old, mossy, rough-hewn park pales’, rustic hovels, mills and cottages（ Price 1810, I : 22, 55, 57）. He was particularly fond of old pollards that resulted from the ‘indiscriminate hacking of the peasant’ and Figure 1. Salvator Rosa Study of Trees, 1640s, ink the ‘careless method of cutting, just as the drawing. © Trustees of the British Museum. This farmer happened to want a few stakes or drawing was one of six purchased by Uvedale Price on his visit to Italy in 1768. He thought poles.’ He celebrated the ‘spirit of animation’ they were ‘admirable specimens of the found in ‘the manner in which old neglected unparalleled freedom & lightness of his pen’ and pollards stretch out their limbs across these they epitomise aspects of the picturesque hollow roads, in every wild and irregular theorised by Price. direction : on some, the large knots and protuberances, add to the ruggedness of their twisted trunks’ and found them in many ways more attractive than ‘the finest timber tree, however beautiful’ in terms of health and vigour （Price 1810, I : 244）. There is now an extensive literature on the picturesque debate which followed the publication of Price’s Essay in 1794 and his attack on the well-established landscaping of Capability Brown （Hussey 1927 ; Hipple 1957）. Following the bicentenary of the publication of the Essay and The Landscape in 1994 there has been more interest in the relationship between Price’s ideas on landscape history, cultural geography and practice（ Everett 1994, 103―15 ; Daniels and Watkins eds. 1994 ; Ballantyne 1997, 86―109 ; Daniels 1999, 103―47 ; Copley and Garside eds. 1994 ; Macarthur 2007）. Price’s theoretical originality lay in his definition of the picturesque as a third aesthetic category lying between Burke’s sublime and beautiful. Price’s ideas on the theory of landscape aesthetics were more deeply rooted in an understanding of classical authors and modern poets rather than contemporary theoreticians such as Kant and Alison. His practical understanding of the creation and management of landscapes and the relationship between architecture and landscape, however, was at the forefront of contemporary knowledge. His critical engagements with John Nash, Richard Payne Knight, Humphry Repton, John Claudius Loudon, William ― 21 ― 510 Japanese Journal of Human Geography 66―6（2014） Sawrey Gilpin and William Wordsworth brought about a novel understanding of the way that landscapes could be made, managed and enjoyed.

Load more