ABSTRACT
This chapter argues not only that the view became ubiquitous and pervasive in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but also that the values encoded within the picturesque image were capable of translation from one landscape to another, from the ‘original’ to the ‘simulacra’. If topographical similarities played a part in the naming of new landscapes after those familiar from the old world, nostalgia, or a sense of longing for the motherland, was certainly also a factor. That the imagery of Richmond, particularly the compositional qualities of the view from Richmond Hill, had become a revered and instantly recognisable landscape model is demonstrated by the frequency of its reference in the journals of travellers. The landscape of Richmond-upon-Thames was itself permeated with nostalgic sentiment; the villas of Pope and Burlington were evocations of the classical model while their gardens called to mind Claude Lorrain’s paintings and Virgil’s texts.
