Proposal for the hillside at Chatsworth

KENT’S TASTES AND INTERESTS before he left for Italy in 1709 are virtually unknown or at best must be left to speculation. Any enlightening JÎ facts and documentation have long vanished. The budding young painter may well have been observant and curious, but the rural Bridlington countryside in the later seventeenth century was a desert as far as...

The picturesque vogue of the eighteenth century has come to be seen as a phenomenon of garden and landscape taste. While this may be true of its later phase, such an emphasis distorts its earlier history, with the consequence that much discussion of the beginnings of landscape gardening in the first fifty...

~~This essay is about how we read Turner’s landscape paintings, especially those which picture country estates. I use “read” about Turner’s landscape paintings for a variety of reasons. First, because his paint upon the canvas is in two respects like words upon the page—it is a symbolic language...