in his A Guide to the Lakes, in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (1778); William Gilpin
(1724–1804) in his illustrated Observations, Relative Chiefly to Pictorial Beauty, Made in the Year
1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and
Westmoreland, published in 1786 (but in circulation in manuscript form from the mid1770s); and
Uvedale Price (1747–1829) in his Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the
Beautiful (1794). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757) by Edmund Burke (1729–1797), of which an extended edition appeared in 1759, had prepared the
ground by defining the aesthetic categories of the “beautiful” and the “sublime,” although it had not
defined or analyzed the more hybrid category of the “picturesque.”
Burke theorized different experiences of nature in terms of their emotional effect on us. He drew on the
common eighteenthcentury notion that our sense of sight has a particularly strong effect on our
physiology, nerves and emotions. His category of the “beautiful” applied to scenes from nature that evoke
in us responses of love and affection, and he characterized such scenes by referring to formal attributes
such as smoothness, gradual variation and delicacy (Burke, 1988 [1759], 146–150). To many eighteenth
century artists, such attributes were exemplified in the works of Claude, with their subtle tonal effects and
delicately curving hills and paths leading the eye into the distance. Claude’s works emphasized general
effect rather than intricate detail. The “sublime,” on the other hand, was associated with feelings of terror
that produce “unnatural tension and certain violent emotions of the nerves” (Burke, 1988, 163). Triggers
of the sublime include “obscurity,” great power, vastness and elements of “privation” such as darkness,
which deprives us of light (Burke, 1988, 163–177). Landscape artists could translate these ideas visually
into mist and cloud (which “obscure” vision), powerful, high waterfalls, vast vistas on an apocalyptic
scale that seem to spill beyond the picture frame, lightning storms, jagged rocky chasms and dark caves or
shadows. The works of Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) were deemed to incorporate elements of the sublime
(Andrews, 1999, 130), and those of Gaspard Dughet/Poussin to combine elements of both the sublime and
the beautiful. The aesthetic of the sublime was adopted extensively by artists of the Romantic (late
eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries) era, as it suited their ambitions to transcend pictorial
rationality and realism in order to appeal to the realm of the imagination. In the eighteenth century, artists
such as Caspar Wolf (1735–1783), John Robert Cozens, Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759–1817),
Loutherbourg, Richard Wilson and Wright of Derby made liberal use of sublime motifs, though not always
in the more dramatic and fantastic ways of their Romantic successors. Largerscale works in oils of such
subjects carried increasing status.
The picturesque as described by Gilpin, Price and others, was applied to a range of landscapes, with
mountainous regions such as the Welsh mountains, the Lakes, the Peak District, the Wye Valley and the
Scottish Highlands considered particularly appropriate to its requirements (Figure 2.15). West was among
those who introduced tourists (and their sketchbooks) to the concept of viewing “stations” or spots from
which “pictorial” views might be observed, recorded and modified. The picturesque tourist would also
be equipped with a Claude glass, a mirror mounted on a tinted base that a viewer could use while
standing with their back to a view, looking at its reflection as they held the mirror over their shoulder. The
reflection in this “mirror” (or glass) would then color the view in a way that made it resemble the subtle
gradation of warm, brownish tones typical of a Claude painting. In terms of content, an eighteenth
century picturesque composition was expected to have a kind of controlled ruggedness that combined a
Claudean ideal beauty with the variety and rough edges of a landscape in the northern European landscape
style. It presented an artful rearrangement of the natural world, drawn from Claudean conventions. To this
was added sufficient naturalistic detail (of light, color, cottages, castles, vegetation, passing figures,
animals, paths, streams, rippling waves, rough rock surfaces, bridges) to provide the visual intricacy and
variety necessary to guide and entertain the eye. Foreground figures such as laborers, fishermen and