Or the Capital P on Picturesque
Having always thought that picturesque was just another adjective favoured by my grandmother’s generation, it was with some surprise when the other day I stumbled on Picturesque.
With a capital P.
(Such was my Surprise it deserves a capital S. Just goes to show that while we figuratively tack and veer, each happy captains of our own HMS General Culture bound for far ports of call, thankfully we need not set out to sea in them physically. I for one would have sunk long ago.)
Picturesque. Origin: 1703: from French pittoresque, from Italian pittoresco “pictorial” (1664) from pittore ‘painter’ (from Latin pictor). The change from -tt- to -ct- was due to association with “picture”. (A “pictorial”, referring to a “journal in which pictures are the main feature” is first recorded 1844.)
What is picturesque as placed in relation to the beautiful and the sublime? It is . . . the characteristic pushed into a sensible excess. – Thomas de Quincey. (1785 – 1859)
Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable. – Anthony Trollope (1815–82)
Pictures must not be too picturesque. – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82)
Had I never visited Italy, I think I should never have understood the word picturesque. – Anna Jameson (1794 – 1860)
Arles is certainly one of the most interesting towns I have ever seen, whether viewed as a place remarkable for the objects of antiquity it contains, or for the primitive manners of its inhabitants and its picturesque appearance. – Marguerite Gardiner (1789 – 1849)
As a word, it certainly swept through Europe: Danish: pittoresk, French: pittoresque, Italian: pittoresco, Norwegian: pittoresk, Portuguese: pitoresco, Romanian: pitoresc, Spanish: pintoresco, Swedish: pittoresk, Turkish: pitoresk.
When William Gilpin published Observations of the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, he may not have known he was posing two milestones; one witness to the growing appreciation of landscape, and especially wild landscape, and the second marking the first steps to the rebuilding of England a century later. (And a third, if more anecdotal milestone: the affixing of the capital P to Picturesque.)
The Grand Tour had long been a must for the English, but of course each time either unrest or a revolution (or Napoleon) made France a rather delicate affair for sight-seers hailing from Albion, some began to appreciate the sights of Tours rather less Grand – in the British Isles. When one can’t have Gay Paree, and when sunrise over the Acropolis and windows with a view in Firenze mean a troublesome detour, well then, one makes do with what’s at hand. Sensing a frustration for far but temporarily out of reach horizons, enterprising souls set about rendering attractive horizons far closer to home.
The availability of Romance in landscape closer to the front doorstep meant that those who could not take the Grand Tour could happily embark on a more modest one. Rather than an education, a landed income and a steamer ticket, all one needed was a Claude glass. The Claude glass, the decorous harbinger of photography, was a darkened convex mirror, often housed in a wallet-like protective case. When judiciously angled, it would frame a landscape (to which the viewer had to turn his or her back) in a manner approaching that of the popular painter Claude Lorrain. The darkened mirror would enhance the light and shadow, the slightly convex surface would push excentric elements further to the borders in a painterly manner. Through a glass, darkly. Critics, of course, with equal alacrity, lampooned all these keen enthusiasts turning their backs on the objects of their fascination in order to see them through a deforming mirror. (Claude glasses are still available today, by the way.)
Parallel to this, a growing appreciation for natural “disorder” was sending weeds, tendrils and snaking vines into the orderly gardens of the Enlightenment Aesthetic. The pleasing rationalism of submissive nature was giving way to something else – a delight in the talent of nature to establish a visual titillation human mastery of the landscape could not provide. While the sublime was an even earlier object of admiration – Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime & Beautiful in 1757 – it was still largely associated with the terrible beauty of the Alps, and had not yet truly returned, largely via Scotland and the Lake District, to British soil. (What the dour and prudent Swiss thought of their own sublime heights, other than the novel opportunity to keep eager and paying English trampers from falling off precipices, has not made it into the art history books.) The sublime had nevertheless come a long ways since the 1720s, when a certain Captain Birt called them ‘monstrous excrescences…rude and offensive to the sight’. (Of course, he was a surveyor, so he may have been fed up with lugging his theodolite up hill and down dale.) Today we would be hard-pressed to concur with Thomas Grey when he wrote, in 1765, of those same picturesque Highlands “The mountains are ecstatic.. None but.. God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror.” But other irreversible changes, changing humanity and changing landscape, were already en route.*
No other painterly movement can have contributed so much to the subjects it portrayed as the Picturesque. Not content to rearrange elements on canvas, the Picturesque set about rearranging the landscape itself. While the Sturm und Drang of the wild and beautiful “sublime” spurned the human observer, and the landscape considered “beautiful” encouraged passive contemplation, the prior imprint of the hand of man on the rurality of the “picturesque” invited an unrolling of sketches and plans and a rolling up of shirtsleeves. With just a little help, the neglected thatch-roofed cottage could become the centerpiece of a most pleasing composition. The jagged outline of a tumbledown mill could stand being silhouetted for greater effect. Unlike Neoclassicism, which relied on a harmony of proportion bordering on the musical, and not tolerating a note out of place, Picturesque sought out something entirely different – a personal experience with a particular view. (And unlike its close sibling Romanticism, it was not entirely focused on the human beings depicted in the images, humans in the Picturesque landscape were there for proportion, not for pathos.)
Landscapers such as Humphry Repton set about creating the picturesque for the rich landowning gentry. Lakes were rearranged, trees cut down and new ones planted, all designed to be pleasing to the spirit of the new aesthetic. Gilpin followed up with guidebooks and essays, notably Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, Picturesque Travel and Sketching Landscape. Landscape was to be an experience. In his words: “Turn the lawn into a piece of broken ground: plant rugged oaks instead of flowering 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.” (Gilpin also considered that the only way to render the Neoclassical palatium palatable was to take a sledgehammer and bash half of it into a ruin. The Picturesque could almost be considered the revenge of the supplanted Baroque, but accomplished with rhododendrons not Roccoco.)
Much of what we find somehow strikes a soft inner chord in English landscape is a work of art in the most practical sense. The new ideals created new landscapes, which confirmed new ideals, in a never-ending spiral of nostalgia and modernity, culminating in the creation of Follies, some even copied from the paintings of Claude Lorrain. (The most curious and poignant reliquae of the trend are the so-called “Famine Follies” in Ireland, where starving cottiers were employed by well-meaning patrons to build curious ruins, roads to nowhere and piers in the middle of bogs. What they might have thought of such futile and picturesque undertakings is likely part of the great unrecorded voice of the anonymous.)
Romanticism replaced NeoClassicism not only on easels, but in the hearts of the moneyed gentry. Ruins became attractions. Who in their right mind would have tramped miles to see a ruin – a ruin! – half a century before? The six hundred and fifty monasteries Henry VIII had seized, stripped and destroyed in 1530 became the focus of the romantic poets, a new lease on life after two centuries of neglect. The sacralization of ruins, which theretofore had been eminently practical sources of quarried stone, now supplied a new material which involved far less heavy lifting and vindicated a romanticizing of their settings just as runaway modernity, the kind that darkened skies, sent steam-driven contraptions hurtling along viaducts that bisected that same suddenly vulnerable landscape like the stroke of a scalpel, provoked the reinvention of a pastoral and pleasant past. Even the denizens of the countryside, the rural, indentured poor, whose lot had not improved – perhaps even worsened – since the Middle Ages, were much appreciated (from a reasonable distance of course).
(Naturally enough, slums were invented at the same time as Romanticism. As the rural poor trudged to the cities, and the moneyed city dwellers rushed to admire the landscape, in a curious dysfunctional duet of bright Romanticism and dull drudgery. According to the etymological dictionary, slum appears in 1845, from back slum “back alley, street of poor people” (1825), originally a slang word meaning “room,” especially “back room” (1812), of unknown origin. While Friedrich could, with great conviction, paint Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in 1818, under the new and man-made Nebelmeer laboured the far less fortunate.)
The 18th century was very much the century of the Picturesque. While no one person can be credited with “inventing” the trend, it was the product of many factors culminating in a remodeling of England. When the apostle of the Gothic Revival, Augustus Pugin, died in the mid 1800’s, largely from frustration, idiosyncratic and nostalgic England had made its lasting contribution to the landscapes of Europe. All in the name of Art.
But then Art was about to really begin reinventing itself with a frenzy. Few people recall that the much maligned and even more superbly ignored Napoleon III created the Salon des Refusés in France in 1863, in order to show artists that the official Paris Salon had rejected. (He also created the park of the Buttes-Chaumont, which was intend to allow Parisians to experience the diversity of the entirety of France, six decades before the first “congés payés” would allow them to do it for real.) The Pre-Raphaelites’ ultimately genteel revolution was also under fire; none other than Charles Dickens qualified Millais’ Christ in the House of his Parents as “commonplace and irrelevant”. Happily for them, the energetic Ruskin voiced, and very loudly too, the concerns that their paintings could only portray. (His qualifying Alma-Tadema’s The Phyrric Dance as “exactly like a microscopic view of a small detachment of black beetles, in search of a dead rat” caused quite an uproar.)
Public taste and expectations were changing as well. Paintings imitating landscape imitating paintings naturally enough bred a desire to have pretty pictures in one’s own modest home. The same century witnessed a flourishing of minor artists, dab hands skillful enough to paint picturesque landscapes for an undemanding public, who wanted a pretty picture or two of their own. The painting establishment sniffled at this tendency with consternation. How was Art to uplift the masses if the masses could have they wanted in their own homes? Were not the “artists” so promiscuously pandering to their new clientele also enemies, lowering art from the neck-cricking heights of the grand salons to the eye-level bed-sits of commoners? It was certainly the end of Art.
And in a sense, it was; 1863 is generally considered a handy date on which to hang the beginning of Modern Art. The Grand Tour was also by then a thing of the past, passenger trains carrying all and sundry in a Europe suddenly on the move and en masse. America was in the second year of the Civil War. Henry Dunant had finally carried the traumatism of Solferino through to the founding of the International Red Cross in Geneva, Eugène Delacroix, leader of the French Romantics, had died and Thomas Nast created Santa Claus. Modernity as we know it was just around the corner.
But then, that’s what art plus history is all about. Putting capital letters on Ends and Beginnings.
IN OTHER WORDS
A short interview concerning things Tolkien and a few others besides.
* A newsletter on the notions of the appreciation and symbolism of mountains through history has long been in preparation, but it’s a steep slope to climb.
