The term "picturesque" needs to be explained in terms of its relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: those of the beautiful and the sublime. By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment rationalist ideas about aestheticism were being challenged by looking at the experiences of beauty and sublimity as being non-rational (instinctual). Aesthetic experience was not just a rational decision - one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beautiful - rather it was a matter of basic human instinct and came naturally. Edmund Burke in his 1756 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful said the soft gentle curves appealed, he thought, to the male sexual desire, while the sublime horrors appealed to our desires for self-preservation.[1] Picturesque arose as a mediator between the opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, showing the possibilities that existed in between these two rationally idealized states. As Thomas Gray wrote in 1765 of the Scottish Highlands "The mountains are ecstatic.. None but.. God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror." [1]. See also Gilpin and the picturesque.
Stowe Buckinghamshire
Stowe is a village and also a civil parish within Aylesbury Vale district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is the location of Stowe House, a Grade I listed country house, and Stowe School, which occupies the mansion. It is situated about two miles north-northwest of Buckingham. A corner of the Silverstone Circuit has been named after the village.
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