A reaction against Brown’s smooth parks, led by Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight in 1794: a landscape of roughness, intricacy and sudden variation, learned from painting, with old trees left to grow, broken ground, rocks, ruins and rustic buildings.
The word came from painting: a picturesque scene was one that would make a picture. William Gilpin’s tours of the Wye (1782) and the Lakes taught travellers to look at real country as if it were a painting by Claude, Gaspard Dughet or Salvator Rosa, and to judge it by the rules of composition. By the 1790s the picturesque had become a quarrel about gardens.
In 1794 Uvedale Price published his Essay on the Picturesque and Richard Payne Knight his poem The Landscape. Both were Herefordshire landowners, and both attacked Brown and his followers for parks that were bald, smooth and all alike: the same clumps, the same belt, the same shaven lawn. Price defined the picturesque as a quality of its own, distinct from Burke’s beautiful and sublime, made of roughness, sudden variation and irregularity (Roughness and sudden variation). Knight’s poem was illustrated with two engravings by Thomas Hearne of the same scene, one dressed in Brown’s manner, one left rough.
Humphry Repton, who had begun his career as Brown’s successor, answered them in print, but he took much from them. A park, he argued, is for living in, and the ground near a house should suit the house; he brought back the terrace, the flower garden and the conservatory, and the picturesque became one of several manners a designer could choose (A terrace and flower garden at the foot of the house).
The Picturesque was also a way of building. The irregular house, the castle or Italianate villa of Nash and Knight, rambling and asymmetrical, was planned to be seen in a landscape from many points. The cottage orné, the rustic lodge and the model village (Blaise Hamlet, by Nash, 1810–11) were picturesque objects. At Scotney Castle in Kent (1835–43) a new house was built on a hill and the old moated castle below was partly unroofed to become a ruin in the view. The taste prepared the way for the Victorian love of variety and for Robinson’s wild garden.