beggars were often used to lead the eye into a composition or to add human interest. Watercolor works by
Thomas Hearne (1744–1817), John “Warwick” Smith (1749–1831) and larger oil paintings by
Gainsborough composed picturesque scenes full of dappled light and visual intrigue.
Figure 2.15 Thomas Girtin: Lake Windermere and Belle Isle, pencil, pen and ink and watercolor on
paper, 35.3 × 48.7 cm, c.1792–1793. The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.
Source: Courtesy of The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.The aesthetic theories of writers such as Burke, Gilpin and others, combined with direct experience of
landscape tourism, assisted the development of a richer, more discriminating taste in landscape art,
particularly in Britain, as the eighteenth century progressed.
Still Life
Still life painting, or the painting of arrangements of objects, food and flowers, had flourished from
antiquity onwards, reaching its “golden age” in Dutch and Spanish works of the seventeenth century. The
term “still life” was not used in many contexts in the eighteenth century, when the works to which it now
alludes were often described in France as “genre” paintings.
The term “still life” derives from the seventeenthcentury Dutch term stillleven meaning “still” or
“motionless” nature (Cummings, 1985, 251). The later French equivalent, nature morte, takes things one