ABSTRACT
Picturesque scenes and objects appealed to everybody who aspired to the reputation of being “artistic.” The recognition of the picturesque had become as instinctive as that of day and night. The picturesque phase through which each art passed, roughly between 1730 and 1830, was in each case a prelude to romanticism. One of the most curious characteristics of the picturesque phase is the succession with which it affected the various arts. Parallel and simultaneous with the development of the “ideal picturesque” in Italy, grew up the naturalistic landscape school of Flanders. Picturesque Sublimity seems never to have been used as a qualifying category, though William Gilpin and all other travelling sketchers had to decide repeatedly at what point it ceased to be possible to delineate the sublime. Picturesque beauty, according to Payne Knight, was the abstract beauty of colour and pigmentation at which subsequently Impressionism aimed.
