‘Nature too wild’ ?: Picturesque Landscaping and Uvedale Price

Abstract

This paper considers the relevance of the work of Uvedale Price (1747-1829) to debates about the relationship between nature, landscape and society. It focusses on the management of gardens and trees and concludes by assessing his influence on nineteenth century ideas of nature, art and landscape. Uvedale Price published his Essay on the Picturesque in 1794. He defined the ‘picturesque’ as an aesthetic category lying somewhere between Edmund Burke’s ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’. He saw the Essay as a practical guide to managing estates and in this it was generally well received. It generated a literary controversy as he set his ideas of the picturesque forcefully against the then established and celebrated national style of landscape gardening practiced and popularised by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Price’s work influenced literary figures such as Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth; artists such as John Constable and David Cox and landscape gardeners such as Humphry Repton; John Claudius Loudon and William Sawrey Gilpin. By the mid-nineteenth century picturesque ways of seeing the landscape had become so normal and natural that Uvedale Price’s contribution to the debate began to be forgotten, to be revived by architectural historians in the twentieth century.