52 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



the vague and conflicting opinions of most preceding writers 

 on this branch of the subject ; some, like Repton, insisting 

 that they are identical ; and others, like Price, that they 

 are widely difierent. 



Gilpin defines Picturesque objects to be " those which 

 please from some quality capable of being illustrated in 

 painting." 



Nothing can well be more vague than such a definition 

 We have already described the difference between the 

 beautiful landscapes of Claude and the picturesque scenes 

 painted by Salvator. No one can deny their being essen- 

 tially distinct in character ; and no one, we imagine, will 

 deny that they both nlease from " some quality capable of 

 being -illustrated in painting." The beautiful female heads 

 of Carlo Dolce are widely different from those of the pictu- 

 resque peasant girls of Gerard Douw, yet both are favorite 

 subjects with artists. A symmetrical American elm, with 

 its wide head drooping with garlands of graceful foliage, is 

 very different in expression from the wild and twisted larch 

 or pine tree, which we find on the steep sides of a moun- 

 tain ; yet both are favorite subjects with the painter. It is 

 clear, indeed, that there is a widely different idea hidden 

 under these two distinct types, in material forms. 



Beauty, in all natural objects, as we conceive, arises 

 from their expression of those attributes of the Creator- 

 infinity, unity, symmetry, proportion, etc. — ^which he has 

 stamped more or less visibly on all his works ; and a beau- 

 tiful living form is one in which the individual is a harmo- 



properly estimated among those barren copyists which we find so many of our 

 flower, landscape, and portrait painters to be. But the artist stands much 

 higher in the scale, who, though a copyist of visible nature, is capable of seiz- 

 ing it with poetic feeling, and representing it in its more dignified sense ; such, 

 for example, as Raphael, Poussin, Claude, &c."— Weinbreunep. 



