Picturesque

Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's leisured travellers to examine "the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty". Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century. The term "picturesque" needs to be understood in relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: the beautiful and the sublime. By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment and rationalist ideas about aesthetics were being challenged by accounts of the experiences of beauty and sublimity that involved non-rational elements. Aesthetic experience was not just a simply deliberate, conscious rational decision based on principles of, e.g., symmetry, proportion, and harmony. It could come, for instance, more naturally as a matter of instinctual response involving the non-rational appetites. For instance, Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful argued that the soft gentle curves appealed to the male sexual desire, while the sublime horrors appealed to our desires for self-preservation. Picturesque arose as a mediator between these opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, showing the possibilities that existed between these two rationally idealised states. As Thomas Gray wrote in 1765 of the Scottish Highlands: "The mountains are ecstatic […]. None but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror."

post-hardcore

I Hope You Hate It - 2024-12-06T00:00:00.000000Z

IYKYK - 2023-04-21T00:00:00.000000Z

Do You Feel O.K? - 2020-04-24T00:00:00.000000Z

Back to Beautiful - 2017-07-14T00:00:00.000000Z

Monstrous Things - 2015-11-20T00:00:00.000000Z

Everything's Just Fine - 2024-10-30T00:00:00.000000Z

Strange Habits - 2023-03-21T00:00:00.000000Z

Hopeless - 2023-02-21T00:00:00.000000Z

ATTN: - 2020-03-18T00:00:00.000000Z

Heartless - 2020-03-12T00:00:00.000000Z

Necessary - 2020-01-24T00:00:00.000000Z

Crimes - 2019-10-24T00:00:00.000000Z

Swipe - 2019-07-19T00:00:00.000000Z

11 Minutes - 2019-03-15T00:00:00.000000Z

Pray - 2018-12-07T00:00:00.000000Z

Becoming Closer to Closure (Acoustic) - 2018-05-21T00:00:00.000000Z

Do Re Mi - 2018-05-21T00:00:00.000000Z

Scars to Your Beautiful - 2018-05-21T00:00:00.000000Z

Dead Flowers - 2018-03-23T00:00:00.000000Z

Broken Home Sessions (Acoustic EP) - 2015-07-02T00:00:00.000000Z

Picturesque EP - 2014-12-15T00:00:00.000000Z