Gilpin was a rural schoolmaster and clergyman who believed that aesthetic qualities were based on objective properties.

Central to the debate were questions about how and where aesthetic properties were constituted. However, that conformity might be deliberate or by chance and, consequently, the expression was equally applicable to designed and natural subjects: gardens and remote wilderness, artful compositions and haphazard arrangements, brushstrokes within a painting, and even paintings themselves.ĭuring the last third of the eighteenth century, the meaning of 'picturesque' became a major subject of debate among three theorists particularly interested in landscape: William Gilpin (1724 –1804), Uvedale Price (1747 –1829), and Richard Payne Knight (1750 –1824). Until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the term generally implied that the subject in question was to some degree in keeping with conventions of painting.

For example, in notes to his translation of Homer's Iliad (1715 –1720), the poet Alexander Pope (1688 –1744) used the word 'picturesque' to signal descriptive passages that, when visualized, were particularly compelling.

Ostensibly derived from the Italian pittoresco or the French pittoresque, meaning 'like a picture' or 'as if by a painter,' the English version exceeded those meanings even in its earliest usage. Use of the term 'picturesque' has varied greatly since its emergence in the late seventeenth century, and its meaning has been frequently disputed.

Picturesque