picturesque, artistic concept and style of the late 18th and early 19th centuries characterized by a preoccupation with the pictorial values of architecture and landscape in combination with each other.
Enthusiasm for the picturesque evolved partly as a reaction against the earlier 18th-century trend of Neoclassicism, with its emphasis on formality, proportion, order, and exactitude. The term picturesque originally denoted a landscape scene that looked as if it came out of a painting in the style of the 17th-century French artists Claude Lorrain or Gaspard Poussin. In England, the picturesque was defined in a long controversy between Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight as an aesthetic quality existing between the sublime (i.e., awe-inspiring) and the beautiful (i.e., serene), and one marked by pleasing variety, irregularity, asymmetry, and interesting textures. For example, medieval ruins in a natural landscape were thought to be quintessentially picturesque.
The picturesque never evolved into a coherent theory, but various works of architecture and landscape gardening display its influence, particularly in an emphasis on the relation between buildings and their natural or landscaped setting. Price was the foremost exponent of the picturesque in landscape gardening. The English architect and town planner John Nash produced some of the most exemplary works incorporating the concept. See also folly.