Chapters 12 and 13 have shown the taste for the Picturesque and its popularity, but it deserves a section to itself as being so closely linked to pictorial art. The movement reached full force and intensity during the later 18th century and lent itself readily to representation in prints. Basically it favoured a wilder, natural-looking and unspoilt landscape (either actually or seemingly), and was originally applied to that rather than to gardens. Of course, it fitted in well with the direction the landscape garden was taking, not so much in the expansive though smooth parks of Brown as in the deliberately cultivated wildness of what has been called the Savage Picturesque. It may be remembered that Richard Payne Knight, propagandist for the Picturesque, felt moved to include two polemical prints in his poem ‘The Landscape’ (1794): these have been discussed in the opening chapter (see Figs 1.4 and 1.5). Both were directed against Brown. An article on ‘The Print and the Spread of the Picturesque Ideal’ appeared in 1995,1 but that was concerned with landscape rather than gardens, and concentrated on prints engraved after the work of well-known artists, initially Continental but then British, depicting picturesque and sublime scenes at home.

The relationship of the Picturesque to gardens has been examined in the present author's book The Picturesque and the Later Georgian Garden, and it is not proposed to cover that ground here. In summary, however, the movement started, as the name suggests, as a comparison with paintings; it developed with the idea that garden design should follow the principles of painting, such as perspective, grouping and light and shade; and finally proceeded into following only those paintings that exhibited a wild nature, with broken, irregular features. The timescale is generous, starting as least as far back as Vanbrugh opining in 1709 that the ruins of the medieval Woodstock Manor at Blenheim in the park at Blenheim (Fig 14.1) would form ‘One of the Most agreable Objects that the Best of Landskip Painters can invent’.

The closeness of the relationship between paintings and gardens was asserted right through the century. Alexander Pope declared that ‘All gardening is landscape painting’ and consciously applied the artist's technique of perspective to make a walk at the foot of the garden appear longer by narrowing it to the far end.