Revolution and Romanticism

UVEDALE PRICE

On the Picturesque 1796

In the controversies of the 1790s surrounding the perception of landscape there stands the somewhat eccentric figure of Uvedale Price. Himself the owner of an estate in Herefordshire with the means to alter Nature, he opposed the large-scale planning of Capability Brown, arguing instead for the wild and unimproved; but it was to be wild and unimproved as seen through the eyes of the great landscape painters, notably Claude. Price was like William Gilpin in trying to define the Picturesque, and like Gilpin also in that he acknowledged Burke and his distinction between the Sublime and the Beautiful. But their approaches were diffferent. Gilpin idealized the natural scene to form a picture. Price referred to pictures in creating the natural scene. Both pointed the way to the creative perception of Wordsworth’s picturesque, in Tintern Abbey.

£75 $125

Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains, and of all that we behold
From this green earth - of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create,
And what perceive ...
(Tintern Abbey, lines 103-7)

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Poetry of the 1890s