Andrew's Wiki
Turnerian Picturesque

  • Whereas European landscape shows that people are connected still with history, we in England prefer the “neat” and trim and new; we like to be fashionable, not worry about history. Calais church is continuous with history, weather-beaten, still in service; a living present.
    • English character doesn’t like the noble picturesque.
    • English modernism: “entire denial of all human calamity or care” but instead “swept proprieties and neatnesses of English modernism”
  • Contrasts “real invention” of artists like Turner with the “piece of manufacture” that calculating artists create as “simply a matter of recipe and practice as cookery”
    • Real artists receive “true impression” and convey it to the audience
    • Not a realistic transcription, but instead “higher and deeper truth of mental vision” rather than physical fact, “useless to geographers and engineers”
    • Real art “when tried by rule or measure, totally unlike” the real model
    • Accurate in the sense of reproducing the impression