Picturesque Anticipations of the Avant-Garde and the Landscape

Abstract

The Picturesque, as it has come to be considered a weak, indulgent, and artificial mode of seeing and designing the landscape, would seem an unlikely analytic probe into the relation between the avant-garde and the landscape. The challenging, rather than the comforting, Picturesque was proposed by Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price by borrowing ideas from political theory to compose the relation between tyranny and license, between artifice and nature. By working at both ends of this continuum of sustainable compositions, the Picturesque indicated how to produce landscapes that incite as well as soothe.