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 different. 
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 please 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.” — Weinbreuner. 
