The Picturesque Landscape Tradition
Landscape as art: the Picturesque tradition is an exploration of the idea of the Picturesque landscape in both its historical and contemporary context. The participants are both landscape historians and contemporary artists, and the format is a combination of illustrated talks, theatrical readings, musical performance, and photography.
The Picturesque landscape tradition has been a powerful aesthetic force in Ontario, but has tended to be analyzed in a purely historical and stylistic context. This initiative is intended to open up a much deeper investigation of the artistic instincts at play and the contemporary relevance of the tradition.
The very word ‘landscape’ began as a word for a type of painting – contrasted with ‘seascape’ for example – but has since come to refer primarily to the physical form itself rather than the representation of that form. This lecture series is designed to re-explore the question of landscape as representation, as a mode of self-reflection. We have chosen to engage both historians and artists in order to benefit from an exchange of perspectives and insights.
The lecture series is of particular relevance to us at Willowbank because we inhabit a Picturesque landscape of national significance. When the estate was designated a National Historic Site by the Government of Canada, they noted in particular the juxtaposition of the very fine Classical Revival building with its important Picturesque setting. The original landscape design dates from the early 19th Century, at the height of the interest in the Picturesque during the 18th and early 19th Centuries. Although the Picturesque tradition is often ascribed to 17th Century origins in France and Italy and a flowering in England in the 18th Century, the combination of the Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Sublime takes on new meaning with the migration of the style to Scotland and to Canada. It was in these settings that the idea of the Sublime was associated with the idea of ‘wilderness’. In the Canadian context, ‘wilderness’ was the inhabited aboriginal landscape. In the First Nations landscapes there was an intimacy between nature and culture that was at once both unsettling and compelling for the arriving European immigrants, an intimacy not unrelated to the explorations of those involved in the Picturesque tradition.
