ABSTRACT
In the late eighteenth century the appreciation of landscape was extended beyond the bounds of the designed landscape and the country estate to the wider English countryside. The conceptual process of appreciation remained the same in this new context: subject, object, observation and the imagination. Cottages emerged as one of the most popular natural objects chosen for Picturesque appreciation and representation by theorists, artists and genteel rural tourists. Roughness was well suited to the appreciation of the English countryside; neither tended lawns nor mountain crags but hedge, tree, rolling hill, field and stream. In nineteenth-century art criticism, the themes of landscape, observation and the appreciation of the vernacular cottage were pursued by John Ruskin in The Poetry of Architecture, 1837. The irregular forms and mixed materials of rural vernacular cottages were an appealing scene for the Picturesque tourist of the late eighteenth century. The Picturesque defined polite society's view of the English landscape and its contents through the nineteenth century.
