Show the natural beauties of a place and hide its defects; give it an appearance of extent and freedom by disguising the boundary; conceal every interference of art, so that the whole seems natural; and remove or hide whatever serves only convenience and cannot be made ornamental.
Rules · Theory · Site · Optics
Roughness and sudden variation
Value in a landscape the qualities painters seek, roughness, sudden variation and irregularity, which are neither beautiful nor sublime but picturesque; keep old trees, broken banks and intricate views, and do not smooth everything into lawn and clump.
Burke had held that beauty lies in smoothness and gradual variation. Price observed that what painters loved was often rough: an old oak with broken limbs, a sandy lane cut deep between banks, a ruin overgrown with ivy. These pleased by intricacy, by partial concealment that excites curiosity, and by sudden contrasts of light, texture and form. He called the quality picturesque and argued that it had its own causes.
Applied to the park, the argument condemned Brown’s smooth lawns, shaven banks and identical clumps. Price asked improvers to study pictures, to leave old trees and undergrowth, and to let water have rough banks. His neighbour Richard Payne Knight made the same case in verse, with engravings of a scene before and after a Brownian improvement.
Related rules
Let the approach be the natural road to the house, without needless turns; let it show the house first at an angle, so that two sides are seen, and not head-on down an avenue; and make it plain that the road leads to this house and nowhere else.
Do not bring the park up to the walls of a house: give the house a terrace, steps and a flower garden in formal lines between it and the park, because the house is a work of art and must be joined to the landscape by art.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Roughness and sudden variation”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/price-roughness. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.