The Picturesque was a peculiarly British reaction to the Romantic attitudes Europe after Jean-Jacques Rousseau had confounded the Age of Reason by opening floodgates of sensibility.

The notion of the picturesque referred both to individual objects and to the landscape, characterised by novelty, changeability, dramaturgy of the stage and surprising the viewer.

A typical Picturesque image contains Beautiful and Sublime, but has key add-ons: a quality of ruggedness and roughness, and a frame around the image. The name comes from artist …

Austen’s sensible characters deplore the Picturesque when it is taken to such extremes that comfort, utility and social morality have to be sacrificed to picturesque pleasures.

ermined by the constraints of the picturesque aesthetic. Searching always for the Sublime antt the Beautiful, the Daniells generally portrayed grandiose views carefully framed with palm and …

At the turn of the eighteenth century the picturesque was a quality which appealed to individuals with a trained and educated eye, who could appreciate the stimulating visual variety which the …

Contrived, or imagined landscapes that included great atmospheric distance, distant or foreground ruins, idyllic scenes with figures.