define picturesque landscape painting and explain how was lndia portrayed in such kind of painting.
Answers
The Picturesque
The concept of the "picturesque" was created by the English clergyman, artist, and writer William Gilpin (1724 - 1804) in his 1768 art treatise Essay on Prints, in which he defined the picturesque rather tautologically — as "that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture."
In later publications Gilpin developed the concept more fully. The picturesque may be thought of as halfway between the beautiful, with its emphasis on smoothness, regularity, and order; and the sublime, which is all about vastness, magnitude, and intimations of power; the picturesque must combine aspects of both of those. A picturesque landscape would have characteristics of roughness (which includes textured or variegated surfaces) — indeed, Gilpin wrote that "roughness forms the most essential point of difference between the beautiful and picturesque" — and an absence of regular or linear elements, and would effectively orchestrate a number of additional compositional elements: distance, light/shadow, "variety," and perspective. In Gilpin's words, "Picturesque composition consists in uniting in one whole a variety of parts.