TOWARDS THE end of the eighteenth century, a tourist was found dead with a shattering of coloured glass around him at the foot of one of the crags in the Lake District. Immediately above him was a prospect station. On investigation it was found that the young Laker had been standing with his back to the drop, attempting to reflect in his Claude glass a pleasing composition of the vista behind him. Eager to get a more complete framing to his composition, he had stepped backwards and inadvertently toppled over the edge, slain by the picturesque movement.
This hobby of collecting vistas represents the common man’s approach to an aesthetic study. Fifty years earlier, young aristocrats, in order to complete their education, travelled on the Grand Tour of Europe, on which they were constantly amazed by such features as the dangers of the Alps, the ruins of the Roman Forum, the prisoner immured for fifteen years in the Bastille: these experiences, part frightening, part mystifying, and full of awe-creating propensity, were regarded as ‘sublime’.
By the 1770s there was a surge of interest in the arts amongst the less moneyed middle-classes who discovered the delights of the home landscape in Wiltshire, North Wales, and the Lakes. A Jesuit priest, the Revd Thomas West, set up a series of simple prospect stations in the hills above the Lakes, detailing their locations in the guides to the area which he wrote. The views that these stations offered could not be termed sublime; they were too homely for that. The discerning, however, could see that the prospect had an interesting roughness about it. One could easily become a connoisseur of landscape viewing, fulfilling Horace Walpole’s prophecy:
How rich, how gay the face of the country! Every journey is made through a succession of pictures. Enough has been done to establish such a school of landscape as cannot be found on the rest of the globe. If we have the seeds of a Claude or a Gasper among us, he must come forth.
It is obvious that Walpole has in mind a landscape which can offer to the artist painterly qualities veering towards an ideal and at the same time will remind him of the large oil paintings of the seventeenth-century Claude Lorraine and Gasper Poussin. But painting was not for all; hence the popularity of the Claude glass, a tinted, concave, double mirror (the camera is the obvious successor) within which the owner could compose – according to a series of principles – his own picture.
Many of the ‘rules’ of composition were formulated by the Reverend William Gilpin, the vicar of Boldre, a small village in the New Forest, and a man much given to making tours. Of this business of composition he wrote:
A dark foreground makes, I think, a kind of pleasing graduation of tint from the eye to the removed parts of the landscape. It carries off the distance better than any other contrivance. The middle and remote distances (which include the compass of the landscape) make the scene; and therefore require most distinction.
Looking at landscape through Gilpin-filtered eyes became a passion. Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey mocked it when she had Henry Tilney take Catherine Morland up Beechen Cliff above Bath, admittedly a city Austen was not fond of, to survey the view:
she confessed and lamented her want of knowledge; declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest, that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of fore-grounds, distances, and second distances – side screens and perspectives – lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar, that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape. Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics, and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.
It would have surprised many of the people who searched for picturesque views to learn that the movement had its beginnings in the early years of the eighteenth century in the construction of gardens for landed aristocrat. William Kent, in Horace Walpole’s words, ‘leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. This extended vision had been achieved by employing ditches, or ha-has (an ‘invention’ of Kent’s master, Charles Bridgeman) instead of walls, so that the landscape beyond the estate could be enjoyed. Kent also set about dismantling the existing Dutch gardens with their geometrically shaped flower beds, and creating an informal setting (he worked ‘without either level or line’, the astonished Sir Thomas Robinson of Rokeby wrote to his father-in-law), which often included a circuitous path around a lake. Both the ha-ha and the lakeside path offered vistas down which one could look to a distant object.
For example, in Rousham Park, in Oxfordshire, there is a small pavilion in which the visitor may sit and admire in the distance the mediaeval Heyford bridge. The view was ‘improved’ (a technical eighteenth-century term) by Kent transforming a cottager’s mundane dwelling into the Temple of the Mill, a quaintly gothicised building, and on a distant hill behind this putting up his Eyecatcher, a quaint screen pierced by a trio of arches. Such practices could be multiplied a thousand-fold.
William Shenstone was both a poet and a garden designer. In describing his own landscape at The Leasowes, near Halesowen in the West Midlands, he uses the term ‘picturesque-gardening’, but with a wider application than Gilpin and his disciples were later to give it when transmuted from adjective to noun. It consisted, he said, ‘in pleasing the imagination by scenes of grandeur, beauty or variety’. It was to this end that artificial ruins were often put into the landscape in order to introduce a feeling of time past and later that a special feature would be made of genuine ruins, such as at Duncombe Park where Thomas Duncombe III constructed a terrace walk high above the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey from which changing prospects of the monastic remains could be appreciated.
But the effect was more than this: for the ruins spoke of mutability and of the shortness of man’s life, engendering a pang of sorrow in the viewer’s emotions. Much within the picturesque garden landscape had this effect on the wanderer: a dark cypress grove; the sight of a broken pillar on a small mound, indicative of a life sadly cut short; the grotto with its damp darkness: all could induce melancholy . . . and so the walk would proceed, with one emotion succeeding another.
There are, therefore, two picturesque movements: the first inducing in the viewer a response to a given object – literary allusion and symbolism play a large part in this. And the second introducing the viewer to a code of aesthetics: feeling, although not absent, gives way to design.
When the tourist with his Claude glass fell to his death from the Lake District crag, these two movements came together, and the design element (an arrangement of lakes and hills) and the emotional element (the life cut short) met together in tragic synthesis.
Originally published under the title ‘With a View to a Death’, this article by Paul Ranger was first published in The Goth, June 1992.
Paul Ranger is a writer, theatre historian, and author of Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820, published in 1991.
All illustrations are of the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, from The Ruined Abbeys of Britain by Frederick Ross, published 1882.
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