The limits of the picturesque in British North America

Abstract

Just as eighteenth-century English gardenists sought to adapt the canons of continental art and gardening to the characteristic diversity and variety of English topography, so English explorers and travellers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries discovered that the wonderful variety of nature displayed in the New World demanded a further adaptation of the schemata for landscape appreciation that had been formulated at home. Fixed principles in the scientific world could no better accommodate the diversity of nature being found in the South Pacific and North and West North America than the fixed principles in European landscape gardening could echo the genius loci of English landscapes.1 The English desire for less controlled landscapes than those executed by French gardenists was at once widely answered in explorers' accounts of new and unpopulated realms. Moreover, the taste for lessartificially arranged and specificallyemblematic natural scenesthat grew during the second half of the eighteenth century, and which, asJohn Dixon Hunt has comprehensively shown in The Figure in the Landscape (1976), occupied British poets and painters no lessthan gardenists, could be brilliantly echoed at times in the accounts of natural terrain which no European hand had yet touched but which seemed nevertheless to possess inherent aesthetic capabilities. This paper will briefly canvass some of the pictorial and narrative efforts by exploring and travelling Britons to realize these capabilities in the landscapes they encountered. For the most part, attention will be paid to points in western and northern British North America where the vastness of grassland or tundra placed a great strain on the traveller's customary deployment of the English schema of the picturesque.

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