ABSTRACT
A degree of ownership is irreducible in the picturesque. Looking involves searching for information, finding our way, attending to the actions of another, but to look at something as if it were a picture is also to imagine it as a product of viewing; a thing to be had. The momentary flattening of space in the picturesque is not simply an occasion for a person of taste to demonstrate visual propensities and skills; nor is it only an affect for architects and gardeners to arouse. In the eighteenth century a picture was a particular kind of image. Unlike a mural, a picture was cut from its context by a frame and made on a transportable surface. We now use ‘picture’ quite generally for many kinds of images, but something of the sense of picture as moveable property has remained in the picturesque. The landscape gardener Humphry Repton used the term ‘appropriation’ to describe this aspect of the picturesque.
