Picturesque

History

The picturesque is an aesthetic category derived from the idea of designing landscapes to look like pictures. The picturesque was at its height in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century, though its development began much earlier and it is still in use today. In American landscape discourse, the term “picturesque” had two important uses. The first referred to a garden style with specific compositional components detailed by theorists such as Thomas Whately and A. J. Downing. The picturesque also came to be understood as a visual effect achieved by the incorporation of natural and designed landscape elements into a prospect or view. This second sense is clear in J. C. Loudon’s 1826 claim that a view was picturesque if “it would form a tolerable picture” when painted. This use of the term was used frequently in travelers’ descriptions of towns, settlements, or gardens. Downing later echoed Loudon when he wrote that “the picturesque is nature or art obeying the same laws rudely” (1849). It is evident that during their historical development, both senses of this term, as either a style or a visual effect, were frequently used simultaneously. In addition, in many cases the term “picturesque” served as an effective expression meaning simply an attractive or pleasing scene, as in the case of William Bartram’s romantic and evocative descriptions of his travels in the south (1792). The goal of the picturesque was to re-create in the garden the experience of the natural landscape. The chief characteristics of the picturesque were surprise and variety, in contrast to the effects of terror and awe associated with the sublime. These characteristics were defined by the theorists Whately and William Gilpin, whose treatises were well known in America. At Mount Vernon, Rev. Manasseh Cutler reported in 1802 that the picturesque effect was enhanced by “coming out of a thick wood, and the sudden and unexpected manner in which it was seen,” underscoring the importance of surprise to the picturesque effect. Similarly, sinuous routes through the garden afforded a “continual change of scenery.” In reference to his picturesque plantations, Downing claimed that the effect depended upon “intricacy and irregularity.”1

In A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1816), G. Gregory insisted that the picturesque garden was possible only in properties that exceeded twenty acres; smaller lots were considered ridiculous for such a function. He thus defines the picturesque garden as part of the larger designed landscape, a portion apart from the house, and extensive and often synonymous with “park.” Any part of a designed landscape, however, could be produced in the picturesque mode, even the ornamental farm as illustrated by Downing [Fig. 1].

The concept of the picturesque was critical to Downing’s approach and a continuous theme in his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1849). Downing defined the picturesque as a style distinct from the beautiful mode of design, but considered both varieties of the modern or natural style of landscape gardening: the “Beautiful” expressed simple and flowing forms, whereas the “Picturesque” had striking, irregular and “pointed” forms. He illustrated the latter term with cottage houses set on relatively modest lots [Fig. 2]. The picturesque style, according to Downing, was

achieved not by size (contrary to Gregory’s definition), but by shapes and outlines of trees, architecture, and grounds. For Downing, the term represented primarily a rejection of all regular and geometric forms in landscape design.

Instructions for laying out the picturesque garden were found in garden literature such as the Horticultural Register, which stated in 1837 that the picturesque was a “facsimile imitation of natural scenery.” In his treatise, Downing advocated that trees should stand in irregular groups not in straight rows [Fig. 3], and paths and borders should be winding or serpentine, adapting to the natural inequalities of the surface. Several writers recommended that any sign of artifice should be disguised.

American scenery, according to Downing and his contemporaries, was a place where, he wrote in 1850, “the wildness or grandeur of nature triumphs strongly over cultivated landscape,” and ultimately harmonizes with the boldly varied picturesque style. The ingredients of Downing’s picturesque included an architecture of projecting profiles and bold outlines, specific vegetation, such as larch trees, and planting schemes of irregular groups. The desired effect could be achieved, according to Downing, at little cost, even on small properties such as farms. He illustrated the picturesque garden in his Treatise with winding lanes, irregular groups of trees, and untrimmed hedges giving a less formal, and a more free and natural air.

Numerous representations and descriptions of designed landscapes emphasized the picturesque aesthetics of the site, exemplified by both image and text of Washington Irving’s Sunnyside [Fig. 4]. Gardens laid out with picturesque features have been documented from the 1740s in the British colonies, in such places as Henry Middleton’s seat, Middleton Place, and William Middleton’s plantation, Crowfield, both near Charleston, S.C. In 1802, Cutler determined that Mount Vernon had “quite a picturesque appearance” because of the successful integration of the building with the surrounding trees. Lewis Miller’s 1849 illustrated account of his visit to Mount Vernon [Fig. 5] repeated Cutler’s description of Washington’s home as picturesque. In the sketch Miller did not position the plantation symmetrically (a view that might have emphasized the bilateral symmetry of the design), but presented the house from an oblique angle that depicted the house off- center, focusing more on the “little copses [and] clumps” that add “a romantick and picturesque appearance to the whole Scenery.” Mount Vernon was a particularly interesting example because specific aspects of its design were often criticized for not being in the more modern, picturesque style. It seems that although individual elements were not deemed to be picturesque, the entire effect of house, gardens, and extended landscape could still be. This tension is also expressed in Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s views of Mount Vernon [Fig. 6]; Latrobe used picturesque conventions to depict the house, even though his written critique of the gardens expressed displeasure with its symmetrical parterres.2

In 1829, at a meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the picturesque garden was presented as one garden type in a list that included the kitchen, flower, and botanical gardens. Its component parts included the imitation ruin, rustic ornament, and exotic styles as indicated by André Parmentier’s advertisement for his services. The rustic prospect tower at Parmentier’s horticultural and botanical garden in Brooklyn, N.Y., was praised by Downing as one of the “most fitting decorations of the Picturesque landscape garden” [Fig. 7]. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Parmentier’s nursery and botanical garden was frequently described in the farm and garden press as an important exemplar of the picturesque. In his own article entitled “Landscape and Picturesque Gardens” of 1828, Parmentier described this modern style, the picturesque, as reinstating “Nature in the possession of those rights from which she has too long been banished by an undue regard to symmetry.”

Nathaniel Parker Willis in American Scenery (1840), made a distinction between the picturesque in American landscape and that elsewhere. In Europe, ruins—symbols of history—were central to the experience of the picturesque. In the United States, however, the “eternal succession of lovely natural objects,” was for Willis, expressive of the future.

-- Therese O’Malley