A Herefordshire landowner’s attack on the smooth parks of Brown, which defines the picturesque as a third aesthetic category beside Burke’s sublime and beautiful, made of roughness, sudden variation and irregularity, and asks improvers to learn from landscape painting.
Uvedale Price (1747–1829) managed his estate at Foxley in Herefordshire himself, and wrote from long looking at trees, lanes and pictures. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) had divided aesthetic experience between the beautiful (small, smooth, gently varied) and the sublime (vast, dark, terrifying). Price argued that much of what painters loved was neither: the shaggy old tree, the rutted lane, the ruined mill, the gypsy and the old horse. Their quality was roughness, sudden variation and irregularity, and he called it the picturesque.
The second half of the essay applies the argument to gardening. Brown’s parks, Price says, are bald and monotonous: the same clumps, the same belt, the same smooth lake, the lawn shaved up to the door. He asks for intricacy, for the old lanes and hollow ways, for trees left to grow in their own forms, and, near the house, for the terraces, balustrades and stairs of the Italian garden that Brown had destroyed.
The book, part by part
I Part I: the picturesque defined
The picturesque as distinct from the beautiful and the sublime; roughness, sudden variation and irregularity; examples from nature and painting.
II Part II: on improvement
The faults of Brown’s manner; the belt and the clump; water; the uses of painting; the old architectural garden near the house.