Picturesque – literally, “like a picture” – entered English from Italian (pitteresco) through French (pittoresque) and the term was common coin by the middle of the eighteenth century, well before it became part of the tradition of philosophical aesthetics. Stewart suggests that its oldest and most general meaning was “that graphical power by which Poetry and Eloquence produce effects on the mind analogous to those of a picture,” and cites for support its use by Joseph Warton (1722–1800) (Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, vol. 1 [1756]), and Johnson who writes of “a picturesque description of love” in his Dictionary of the English Language, although he does not deem it singular enough to warrant an entry for the term in its own right. The term was adopted in England, Stewart observes, with the more familiar meaning of “what is done in the style, and with the sprit of a painter,” and was then attached as an “innovation” of meaning to the genre of landscape painting, which came increasingly into vogue as the century progressed (see PE, 230–ff.). Thus by the time picturesque became an aesthetic term of art, poetry had already found its “picturesque school” in James Thompson (1700–48) and Thomas Gray (1716–71) – The Seasons in particular was a literary and aesthetic landmark – and in fine arts the Baroque landscape artists of France and Italy, Niccolo Poussin (1594–1665), Gaspar Dughet (1613–75), Salvator Rosa (1615–73), and Claude Lorrain (c. 1600–82), provided well-established models for describing scenes witnessed by those on the Grand Tour; the works of Claude in particular were lauded as something akin to the Platonic Form of the picturesque style.