The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime

Abstract

Historically, the three terms of this essay's title have hoped to make an appeal to distinct categories of aesthetic experience: Joseph Addison set the stage, in his Spectator essay of 23 June 1712 (no. 412), by dividing those ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’ that are to be gained from looking at objects, into the ‘Great, Uncommon, or Beautiful’. Nowadays, such divisions are largely redundant, but for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were the subject of heated debate, and, occasionally, rigorous definition.1 One problem for the would-be definers was that the key terms were in common and often casual use.

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