Peter Fredrick Robinson, Village Architecture, or a Series of Designs ... illustrative of the observations contained in the essay on the picturesque, by Sir Uvedale Price (London, 1830).
But even at the crudest level there is more than ideology going on in books such as Robinson's. We could say that the butcher's shop and the possibilities of representing or improving it are an analogue of the 'cottage architecture' going on at this time. Architects such as Robinson published pattern books of designs for cottages, villas and ornamental park buildings which functioned as a space for the invention techniques. The license claimed for such experimentation was both picturesque discourse or the reformist discourse on the condition of the poor; two disourses which were politically, even semantically, incompatible. The space of technical invention seems to be premised on the buildings being an object of both phobic disgust and scenic interest.
This genre of the architectural design of ornamental cottages is the subject of my Ph.D thesis, (University of Cambridge, 1989), and a book in preparation The Ornamental Cottage, Landscape and Disgust. For a description of the genre see Michael McMordie, "Picuresque Pattern Books and pre-Victorian designers," Architectural History (1975) n. 18, pp. 42-59, and my "The Picturesque Cottage: Genre and Technique," Southern Review (1989) v. 22, n. 3, pp. 301-314.
Sir Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque (London: Mawman, 1810).
"The Dialogue" is a supplement added to the Essays in their last, 1810, edition.
In the essay "Economimesis," Jacques Derrida [Diacritics (June 1981), pp. 2-25.] analyses Immanuel Kant's reliance on disgust as the outside of aesthetics. [Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (Oxford: Claredon, 1911), particularly § 48, p. 174.]
Derrida, "Economimesis," p. 4.
"Parergon" and Derrida's other essays on the Third Critique are collected in Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Oddly, given that it is an analysis of the third moment of 'The Analysis of the Beautiful,' "Economimesis" was not republished there.
The Picturesque is a very large and diverse field of study and no characterisation could be short enough to be useful in this paper. I am not suggesting that Price's theory of disgust is definitive of picturesque theory, nor does it explain the whole of Price's theory. Price does give positive definitions of the picturesque in its irregularity, intricacy and variety which I have not discussed here. Before doing so I would need to first establish the importance of genre hierarchies and ornamentation in Price's 'aesthetics.' Christopher Hussey's The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Frank Cass, 1967) remains the best overview and introduction. There has been much revisionist work on the politics of the Picturesque. An excellent recent collection is The Politics of the Picturesque eds. Stephen Copely and Peter Garside, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). There has been less work on the picturesque as aesthetics. A useful exception is Kim Ian Michasiw's "Nine revisionist theses on the Picturesque," Representations (1992), n. 38, pp. 76-100.
Price, Essays v. I, p. 204, 207.
Price, Essays v. I, p. 206-7.
The surrealist Georges Bataille much later defined informe as the idea that some-thing could be spit, or it could equally be a spider. Price would correct him, the incomprehensible body product is informe, but the spider, that super-figural image of malevolent nature, is a necessary partner to spit in making up the conditions of a thorough disgust. Georges Bataille, "Formless," Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989).
Price, Essays v. I, p. 195-196.
Here Price quotes Burke's idea that we can be sure that our judgement is purely aesthetic when we have no wish to see a represented object in reality: "so it is with most of the pieces the painters call still-life: in these a cottage, a dung hill, the meanest and most ordinary utensils of the kitchen are capable of giving us pleasure." Burke quoted, Price, Essays v. iii, p. 324.
Price, Essays v. III, p. 302.
Price, Essays v. III, pp. 328-329.
There are several reasons that the picturesque does not achieve the abstract concept of disinterest which Kant does about the same time. These are: political theory of disinterest; the necessity of maintaining space for a genre hierarchy; and the particular politics of landscape improvements in agricultural estates.
Dutch kitchen paintings typically included biblical scenes partially obscured in the background and thus had the general meaning of warnings against gluttony and worldlyness. An famous example is Pieter Aertsen's Butcher's Shop (Uppsala University, 1551) which includes an ox on a gallows (viewed from the same angle as the Rembrandt) as part of an allegory about the Prodigal Son. Rembrandt reduces all of the figurative and spatial complexity of such paintings to the one monumental image of the ox and thus transcodes its genre with paintings of higher status. Scott A. Sullivan, The Dutch Game Piece (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984); Kenneth M. Criag, "Pieter Aertsen and The Meat Stall," Oud Holland (1982), n. 96, pp. 1-15.
Price, Essays v. III, p. 315-316.
Humphry Repton, The Lanscape Gardening of the Late Humphry Repton Esq. (London: 1840), p. 568. Repton also proclaims "I have never admitted the word ferme orneé into my ideas of taste, any more than a butcher's shop or a pigsty, adorned with pea green and gilding." p. 472.
The word 'townspace' was popularized by Gordan Cullen in the Architectural Review from the late forties, and became the title of his book, (London: Architectural Press, 1961). Nikolas Pevsner had written a number of articles on picturesque theory for Architectural Review in this period [collected in Studies in Art, Architecture and Design (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968)] and is said to have suggested to Cullen that he popularise picturesque theories and practices to assist in the design of New Towns.
John Macarthur, "Ruskin and Barrell on the Heartlessness of the Picturesque," Australasian Victorian Studies Association Conference Papers 1991 ed. B. Garlick, (Brisbane: 1992).