A poem in three books addressed to Uvedale Price, attacking the parks of Brown and his followers, with two plates by Thomas Hearne that show the same scene “dressed” in Brown’s manner and left rough in the picturesque.
Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824), collector, classical scholar and member of Parliament, built Downton Castle in Herefordshire (1772–78), an irregular castellated house set above the gorge of the River Teme, and kept its walks wild. The Landscape appeared in the same year as Price’s essay, and the two men were neighbours and allies, though they later disagreed about whether the picturesque lay in objects or in the mind of the viewer, which Knight argued in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805).
Hearne’s two plates were the poem’s sharpest argument. In one, a Palladian house stands on a shaven lawn above a serpentine stream, with a clump or two and a bare bridge; in the other, the same house is a rambling old building half hidden by trees, and the foreground is broken ground, rough plants and a tumbling stream.
The book, part by part
I Books I–III
Against the improvers; the foreground, the middle ground and distance, as in painting; trees, water and buildings in the picturesque landscape.