Tutor: Laura Mayer
Date: Monday 14 December 2026
Time: 6 - 8:30 pm
Cost: £30
Location: Online


The aesthetic category known as the Picturesque developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Defined by the artist and travel writer William Gilpin as ‘that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’, it was equally applicable to art, architecture and even music. In the case of British landscape, the Picturesque aesthetes championed a Romantic appreciation for rugged and sublime topography. Through their writings, Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight harnessed a growing disdain for the minimal landscapes of Brown and his contemporaries, instead encouraging Picturesque values of irregularity and wildness. This lecture grapples with the paradoxes inherent in a movement which championed unbridled naturalism through the artificial lens of taste, whilst recognising the early role of the Picturesque writers in championing wilderness preservation.