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painting, garden and park design. In addition, it provided a conceptual framework with which to view actual landscapes. One of the earliest theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price, situated the picturesque between the serenely beautiful and the awe-inspiring sublime. In late 18th century Britain, the picturesque implied the avoidance of anything precise or tame, instead emphasized, variety, novelty, ruggedness, and wild, unkempt beauty. Consequently, a potentially dangerous curiosity about colonial people and places, one that might involve violence, conflict, and oppression, had been diverted into the quest for aesthetic novelty. It is important to recognize, therefore, the particularity of the picturesque in the colonial environment and the pleasures it offered. However the picturesque was a dynamic force in the creation of the British Empire. The implication of Edward Said’s work Orientalism, which indicated ‘a western style of dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’, made colonialism possible. The picturesque however was a more comprehensive trope that Orientalism unified the empire by refracting local differences through a single lens.
The cult of the picturesque found inspiration in the abundant material that India provided whether it was landscape, people, or its flora and fauna. By the 1780s English men and women of educated classes had come to look at their surroundings with an eye for the quality of the picturesque. By this time picturesque beauty referred in general to scenes which recalled two different kinds and styles of painting. These were the ideal classical landscapes of Claude Lorraine, Poussin, and Salvator Rosa; and on the other the naturalistic views of the Dutch landscape artists Ruysdale, Hobbema, Cuyp and Van Goyen. It was the works of these two groups of artists that cultured men and women in England in the eighteenth century had seen on the Grand Tour and had grown to admire. The Grand Tour was the 17th- and 18th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, undertaken by upper class young European men of sufficient means and rank and accompanied by a chaperone, such as a family member when they had reached the age of 21 years. During the 1790s three books provided a working aesthetic. Consequent to which, men and women began to look at landscapes in a special way. Equipped with new visions they could travel and look at their surroundings with fresh appreciation. It also resulted in a desire to capture their impressions and put them down on paper.
For the British, the Indian landscape was picturesquness personified. The desire to appreciate and understand nature through art, to achieve a keener more sensitive insight was directed by the dictums laid by Dr. William Gilpin who between 1782 and 1809 produced a series of guides towards painting of picturesque scenes all over England. He pointed out that nature was imperfect from a point of view of a picture and needed to be ordered and improved. He specified that ‘nature’ was always great in design, but ‘unusual in composition’ the art must rearrange the scene to suit the demands of the picturesque. Every view according to him must have three parts the background comprising mountains and lakes, middle ground with valleys, rivers and woods and foreground to contain broken ground, rivers and stones. Imperial art, especially in India, consistently softened, regularized, and beautified the natural landscape, wherein all the pictorial requirements of contrasts of light and shade to capture the evanescent sparkle on water, the glint on leaves, palpable atmosphere, clear foregrounds and misty backgrounds, the textural effects as the roughness of trees, stones, mountains and roots, the shaggy coats of animals, the ragged state of people and the pleasing decay of buildings were clearly delineated.
The spate of British sketching and drawing indulged by the artists served as journals and newsletters. These drawings were also the source of information because they recorded