819
was connected to picture making and aesthetic con-
ceptualizations from the beginning. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the term “landscape” oc-
curred for the fi rst time in 1603 and stood for “a picture
representing natural inland scenery.” The word was
borrowed from the Dutch landschap, probably because
of the infl uence and the prestige of landscape painting
of the Netherlands. In most languages, the word has the
double meaning of both a “piece of land, region” and an
“image” representing such a piece of land. This double
meaning is telling. It focuses our attention on the fact
that landscape has not exclusively been a piece of the
environment or nature, but has been, from the very fi rst,
dependent on its structuring by human presence and by
the gaze in particular.
The importance of landscape and nature in nine-
teenth-century literature, painting, and photography
was also endorsed by new aesthetic concepts, which
originated in the late eighteenth century, on the eve of
industrialization and shortly before the inception of
photography. New notions, such as the sublime and
the picturesque, presented the natural site not only as
an ideal setting for beautiful or heroic acts, but rather
as a primary source of meaning in itself. Throughout
the nineteenth century, many photographers were eager
to demonstrate that their new medium was perfectly
suitable for visualizing these new sensibilities and to
create photographic equivalents of literary and pictorial
evocations of nature.
Particularly the concept of the picturesque, the devel-
opment of which had been closely related to that of the
English landscape garden, became a popular guideline
for many landscape photographers, both professionals
and amateurs. William Gilpin, the pre-eminent theorist
of the picturesque, had argued in the late eighteenth
century that picturesque views should be irregular,
highly textured, and composed of things rugged, rustic,
or antique, stripped of their utilitarian associations. Such
telling details would provoke in the sensitive viewer
poetic refl ection on the passage of time, on the brevity
of glory, and on the ephemeral nature of human achieve-
ment. Preferring the whimsicalness of nature, however,
the aesthetics of the picturesque approached nature
indirectly, through pictures. The term picturesque,
consequently, refers both to a certain kind of landscape,
which is suited as a subject for a painting, and to a frag-
ment of reality that could be viewed as if it would be part
of a painting. On the one hand, the English landscape
gardens were designed to be viewed as a Claude Lorrain
or a Nicolas Poussin might paint them. On the other, the
viewer could discover and recognize picturesque scenes
in nature itself. In his Three Essays on the picturesque
(1794), Gilpin encouraged travelers, for instance, “to
frame views, to graduate prospects from foreground to
background, and above all to ensure variety of painted,
drawn or engraved texture, which minimized similar
qualities in the natural world.”
A few decades later, this was right up the alley of
photographers, who often used their cameras to frame
similar views of the landscape. In particular British
pioneers, such as John Dillwyn Llewelyn and Benjamin
Brecknell Turner, and photographers of the 1850s andLANDSCAPE
Russell, Andrew Joseph.
Hanging Rock, Foot of Echo
Canyon.
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Purchase, The Horace
W. Goldsmith Foundation
Gift, 1986 (1986.1196)
Image © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.