RICHARD PAYNE KNIGHT, StephanieRoss The Picturesque: An 18th Century Debate, "The Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism," Winter 1987, pp.275-277

... I have argued that Price's Essay [Sir Uvedale Price's Essay On The Picturesque, 1794) suggests two accounts of the picturesque. Neither one is satisfactory. The fact that painters and gardeners share compositional concerns and techniques does not explain the sudden vogue for the picturesque. And, Price's fascination with irregular and intricate objects and scenes does not link the picturesque to the art of painting. I shall now turn to the opposing theory of Richard Payne Knight and ask whether it provides a more helpful understanding of eighteenth-century test. Knight shared Price's disdain for the work of Capability Brown, yet his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste offers a very different definition of the picturesque than Price's Essay. It was written with very different motives and reflects very different influences.

Even a brief examination will show that the Inquiry and the Essay differ in scope. Knight's work is much more ambitious than Price's. Knight wasn't addressing the relatively narrow issue of garden improvements; he was attempting to construct a full-fledged theory of taste, in the tradition of Gerard, Allison, Shaftesbury, and (ultimately) Kant. Accordingly, he organized the Inquiry by mental faculties, beginning with chapters on each of the five senses, followed by others on the association of ideas, imagination, judgment, and the passions. In addition, Knight's work is much more erudite than price's. While Price's debt to Burke is clear, Knight's treatise is scattered with references to such classical and contemporary figures as Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Newton, and more. Overall, Knight set out to answer the question "Is there a standard of taste?" And his attempt incorporated many of the intellectual currents of his time, among them associationism, subjectivism, and theories of the operations of the mind.

Knight discussed the picturesque in his long central chapter on the imagination. He differed most strikingly from Price in denying the picturesque a distinct objective character. Declaring that Price's "great, fundamental error" was "seeking for distinctions in external objects which only exist in the modes and habits of viewing and considering them" (p. 196), Knight located the picturesque not in the external world but in the observer's mind. That is, for Knight the picturesque was a mode of association.

Knight enunciated the basic principle of association as follows: "To a mind richly stored, almost every object of nature or art that presents itself to the senses, either excites fresh trains and combinations of ideas, or vivifies and strengthens those which existed before" (p. 143). Knight offered various examples to illustrate this thesis. A peasant and a naturalist would understand insects, plants, and fossils in vastly different ways (p. 143). An uninformed observer would see the heavens as a blue vault with twinkling fires, while a learned viewer would be aware of "unnumbered worlds distributed through the boundless vacuity of unmeasureable space" (p. 144). While taste is based on feeling and sentiment rather than belief and opinion (p. 3), the same relativity applies here. People differently versed in the arts would appreciate painting, music, and poetry in different degrees.

Knight defined picturesque objects and combinations as 'those which exhibit blended and broken tints, or irregular masses of light and shadow harmoniously melted into each other" (p. 150). He also claimed that such objects and combinations would only afford pleasure to perceivers conversant with the art of painting (p. 146). The following long passage spells out the mechanism by which association constitutes the picturesque.

This very relation to painting expressed by the word picturesque, is that which affords the whole pleasure derived from association; which can, therefore, only be felt by persons who have correspondent ideas to associate; that is, by persons in a certain degree conversant in that art. Such persons being in the habit of viewing, and receiving pleasure from fine pictures, will naturally feel pleasure in viewing those objects in nature, which have called forth those powers of imitation and embellishment. . . . The objects recall to the mind the imitations, which skill, taste, and genius have provided; and these again recall to the mind the objects themselves (p. 154-55).

There is a certain reciprocity at work here. A connoisseur, viewing a picturesque scene, is reminded of various paintings it resembles, but later, viewing a painting, his thoughts turn back to the scene. Each enlivens the other and each acquires new meaning imported by intellect and imagination and not owing to sense alone.

Clearly, the picturesque as Knight conceived it is a subjective matter. It is shaped in each instance by the interests and reflectivity of the perceiver. To emphasize this point, Knight noted that we call opposite kinds of things picturesque. He listed among examples the giant oaks of Ruysdael, the full-grown pine or ilex of Claude, and the stumpy decayed pollard of Rubens and Rembrandt. Knight concluded that we can't hope to enumerate or analyze the objects in nature that are picturesque. Thus his approach and Price's are diametrically opposed.

One might object that Knight's theory makes the picturesque ubiquitious. Anything can be picturesque, so long as it reminds someone of a picture. My Airedale might remind someone of a painting by Stubbs, but so too might my bright red Swingaway can opener. Knight offered no provision for ruling out such "aberrant" associations. He insisted that association constitutes a mechanical operation of the mind, one we can't influence or control (p. 136), and later he claimed "though we may analyze the principles of mental, as well as of corporeal pleasures, we can never discover the full extent of their operation" (pp. 232-33).

Some mitigating factors might undercut this objection. An individual's associations are limited not only by his memory and experience, but also by his culture. Within a particular society, popular trends and tastes give us a shared basis for association. For example, eighteenth-century Englishmen of Price's and Knight's class who had shared the experience of the Grand Tour, read many of the same books, and purchased many of the same prints would tend to think of similar paintings in similar circumstances. For such men, the works of Claude, Rosa, and Gaspar became a sort of shorthand representing the three categories of the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque. These considerations don't, however, defeat the objection to Knight's view raised above. For although such commonalities might well in fact constrain the picturesque, it remains promiscuous in principle.

We know that Price and Knight agreed in practical matters of garden improvements. How did their judgments compare with regard to the picturesque? Price described many rough and irregular natural scenes in the course of the Essay as he tried to persuade improvers of the attractiveness of rugged lanes, broken banks, gnarled roots, and overhanging trees. Would Knight have deemed such scenes picturesque? His theory of association counters Price's view, since perceivers acquainted only with beautiful and sublime paintings would not judge the scenes picturesque. Yet his definition of picturesque objects in terms of blended and broken tints, etc., supports Price's position.

Conflicting strands emerge here in Knight's theory. One strand suggests that Knight could mount a physiologically-based argument to show that picturesque scenes would be universally admired. Let me briefly sketch that argument. Throughout the Inquiry, Knight distinguished purely sensual pleasures from those involving intellect and imagination. At the level of sensation, he argued, we are initially drawn to simple qualities but come to find them insipid and to prefer mixtures and diversities (p. 46). "Colors, as well as sounds and flavors, are more pleasing when harmoniously mixed and graduated, then when distinct and uniform" (p. 62). Again, "harmonious combinations of tones and flavors are more graceful than single ones," the eye prefers "tints happily broken and blended, etc." (p. 151). Since such varied combinations are just those which mark Price's picturesque, Knight's remarks seem to provide physiological grounds for supporting Price's view. Transferred to the macro-level, they encourage us to reject the smooth, monotonous gardens of Capability Brown.

In the end, this argument fails to effect a rapproachment between Price and Knight because Knight did not believe that taste was determined by sensory factors. Knight maintained that the beauties of light, shade, and color were the only ones which affect the eye. He also held that painting imitates only the visible qualities of bodies. As a result, painting allows us to appreciate visually pleasing but otherwise offensive objects--decayed trees, rotten thatch, tattered worn-out dirty garments, and fish markets (p. 70). Yet it doesn't follow that we prefer such objects overall. As Knight aptly noted, if this were the case we would not only admire such variegated objects as zebras, multicolored tulips, and jasper or porphyry columns, we'd also prefer pimpled faces to smooth ones (p. 88). We do not prefer pimpled faces, and the reason is that "all the pleasures of the intellect arise from the association of ideas" (p. 143).

Knight's theory, then, carefully distinguished sensory pleasure from the picturesque. The physiology of our sense guarantees that certain sorts of blended and variegated sights, sounds, smells, and tastes will please. In fact, in his closing chapter on novelty, Knight proclaimed that "change and variety are . . . necessary to the enjoyment of all pleasure; whether sensual or intellectual..." (p. 426). Yet, the picturesque transcends this sensory base in two respects: first, variety and irregularity don't guarantee a picturesque object or scene; and second, objects and scenes that are picturesque are not recognized as such by all perceivers, but only by those with the requisite knowledge of painting. Thus Knight resisted the objective pull of Price's theory.

Knight made clear use of satire to establish his point that taste is independent of any physiologically-based preference for variety. Noting that "irregularity of appearance is generally thought essential to picturesque beauty" (p. 199), Knight remarked that "no painter has ever thought of making a man or animal more picturesque by exhibiting them with one leg shorter than the other, or one eye smaller than the other" (p. 199). An even more telling passage addressed an example from Price's 1801 work, A Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the Beautiful. One of the three conversants in that dialogue commented on the picturesque appeal of a rambling and irregular parsonage, and another went on to reply,

I think there is a sort of resemblance between the good old parson's daughter and his house. She is upright indeed, and so are the walls, but her features have a little of the same irregularity, and her eyes are somewhat inclined to look across each other like the roofs of the old parsonage. Yet a clear white skin, clean white teeth, though not very even, and a look of neatness and cheerfulness, in spite of these irregularities, made me look at her with pleasure.

Knight venomously observed that to be consistent, Price should have extended the asymmetry beyond the girl's face. "The same happy mixture of the irregular and the picturesque must have prevailed throughout her limbs; and consequently, she must have hobbled as well as squinted; and had hips and shoulders as irregular as her teeth, cheeks, and eyebrows" (pp. 201-2)

I believe these passages constitute an effective reduction of Price's position. But in the end the two quarrelling theorists were not that far apart. Both ended up endorsing freedom and variety in taste and in gardening. Price's exhortation that gentlemen improve their own estates and discover a variety of uniquely excellent styles was echoed by Knight's closing diatribe against rules of taste. Knight argued that critics, like casuists in morals, have "attempted to direct by rules, and limit by definitions, matters which depend entirely on feeling and sentiment: and which are therefore so various and extensive, and diversified by such nice and infinitely graduated shades of difference, that they elude all the subtleties of logic, or intricacies of calculation" (p. 233). Knight insisted again and again that general rules cannot reach every possible case. This I take it is Knight's answer to the opening question of his Inquiry. There is not a standard of taste, and there should not be, because all such standards are inevitably misleading. ...

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