Though the concept of the sublime had roots in the connoisseurship of Antiquity, the "picturesque" was a new category in the incipient Romantic sensibility of the 18th century. "Picturesque," meaning literally "in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture" was a word used as early as 1703 (Oxford English Dictionary), and derived from an Italiam term pittoresco, meaning, "in the manner of a painter," but the idea of "the picturesque" as an esthetic category was first developed by the connoisseur and teacher Rev. William Gilpin. See Gilpin and the picturesque.

Gilpin's Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting was published in London, 1792.

Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, soon followed, and went into several editions that the author revised and expanded.

The third great essay on the Picturesque was Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, revised . edition London, 1796.

During the mid 18th century the idea of purely scenic pleasure touring began to take hold among the English leisured class. The mode of reshaping landscapes as settings for English country houses, exemplified by Lancelot "Capability" Brown encouraged tourists who were being shown round state apartrments and picture collections, to search also for that quality of the natural landscape through which they might find themselves passing which was capable of being illustrated in an Italian landscape painting.

John Ruskin identified the "picturesque" as a genuinely modern aesthetic category, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture.

In modern times, the essay by the English architectural historian Christopher Hussey , The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, 1927 focused modern thinking on the development of this approach.

External links

• George P. Ludlow, "Ruskin on the Picturesque"
• "Turner's journeys of the imagination"