![]() First is her description of Fanny’s return to from Portsmouth in Mansfield Park: I’ll illustrate this with two examples of travellers in Austen. ![]() Nor is there in travelling a greater pleasure, than when a scene of grandeur bursts unexpectedly upon the eye, accompanied with some accidental circumstance of the atmosphere, which harmonises with it, and gives it double value. He writes in “Essay 2: On Picturesque Travel” about enjoying “the great works of nature, in her simplest and purest stile, open to inexhaustible springs of amusement”, and says On the other hand, there are also places where she seems to exhibit an appreciation and understanding of Gilpin’s theory because, while Gilpin could be dogmatic, he also argued convincingly for a seeing nature with “a picturesque eye”. We must presume that he is not speaking literally when he suggests taking a mallet to a pleasing building in order to make it picturesque! But Jane Austen is sure to have laughed and, as you’ll read in Austenonly’s post, there are many examples in Austen’s novels, particularly Pride and prejudice, Sense and sensibility and Northanger Abbey, in which she satirises the picturesque. No painter, who had the choice of the two objects, would hesitate a moment. In short, from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must, use the mallet, instead of the chisel : we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps. But if we introduce it in a picture, it immediately becomes a formal object, and ceases to please. ![]() The proportion of its parts - the propriety of its ornaments - and the symmetry of the whole, may be highly pleasing. Or someone who writes (in the same essay):Ī piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree. Being a woman of a certain age, I rather like Mr Gilpin! But, seriously, is it really a matter of either/or? How could she not satirise a man who seriously suggests (“Essay 1: On Picturesque Beauty”, Three Essays) that, when it comes to a portrait, “the highest form of picturesque beauty” is not “the lovely face of youth smiling with all its sweet dimpling charms” but “the patriarchal head” with its “lines of wisdom and experience … the rough edges of age”. He expresses his opinions so dogmatically, he is so opinionated, that she can’t help mocking him. The blogger at Austenonly has written an excellent post on Jane Austen and Gilpin in which she proposes – and my group here agreed with her – that Austen was enamoured of him because he appealed to her sense of the ridiculous. In his Essay on Prints (1768), Gilpin defined it as “… a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture”. The “picturesque”, according to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, dates back to 1703 with the meaning, “in the manner of a picture fit to be made into a picture”. He is remembered primarily for his theory of “the picturesque”. William Gilpin (1724-1804) was an English vicar, schoolteacher, prolific writer and amateur painter. This month my local Jane Austen group decided to look a little more deeply at Gilpin, his Picturesque, and what Jane Austen really thought. ![]() 231, August, 1869.Public Domain, via Wikipedia) William Gilpin (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, No. ![]()
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