William Gilpin and the Picturesque in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice - The Gardens Trust

William Gilpin and the Picturesque in Pride and Prejudice

The 'father' of the Picturesque movement who inspired the educated classes in Britain.

He expressed his ideas in a series of written guides to areas with dramatic natural scenery such as the Lake District, which became must-reads for those such as Jane Austen.

Jane Austen, Landscape Design

Picturesque

Georgian

Britain

18th Century, 19th Century

The Picturesque Movement

The Picturesque was a very popular idea in the mid to late eighteenth century, initially focussing on viewing the natural landscape as if it were a picture in a frame, although it later evolved into a more complex set of aesthetic ideals and influenced fashions in English landscape garden design.

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William Gilpin (1724 – 1804) is generally accepted as being the ‘Father’ of the Picturesque movement, expressing his ideas in a series of written guides to areas with dramatic natural scenery such as the Wye Valley and the Lake District, illustrated with his own watercolour paintings. These guides became must-reads for the educated classes in Britain, including Jane Austen, and in the biographical notice in the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818, Jane’s brother Henry wrote “At a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinions either on books or men.”

Landscape with hills, a lake, and figures, William Gilpin, c.1772. Public Domain.

Gilpin on the Grouping of Cattle

One of Gilpin’s many theories on how to identify and appreciate the Picturesque concerned the correct grouping of cattle, and in one of his guides he included two pictures - one showing a group of three cows in a field and the other showing a group of four. He suggests that three cows can be grouped in an attractive manner, but four cannot.

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He elucidates his purpose by explaining:

“… with three, you are almost sure of a good group, except indeed if they all stood in the same attitude, and at equal distances. They generally however combine the most beautifully, when two are united, and the third a little removed. Four introduce a new difficulty in grouping. Separate they would have a bad effect. Two, and two together would be equally bad. The only way, in which they will group well, is to unite three, as represented in the second of these prints, and to remove the fourth.”

Jane Austen and the Picturesque

Jane Austen’s detailed knowledge of Gilpin and the Picturesque is displayed with her characteristic biting wit in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet, inadvertently coming across three people she particularly dislikes on a walk – Mr Darcy, Caroline Bingley and Mrs Hurst - declines the polite but rather forced invitation to join them, saying they are charmingly grouped as they are and adding that a fourth would spoil the composition.

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The full meaning of this is probably largely unappreciated by most of her readers today, but at the time, people would have got the joke and realised that it was a reference to Gilpin’s theory on the grouping of cattle. Lizzie’s playful retort to Darcy’s invitation is therefore a deliciously subtle insult, as she is effectively likening him and the two ladies to cows.

However ridiculous Gilpin’s cow theory may seem to us today, there is no denying that he had a point. There is a reason why gardeners plant in groups of three, five or seven, because an odd number is more aesthetically pleasing than an even one. And his premise that the best of all possible worlds is when two cows stand together and a third is positioned slightly apart, is not only true, but influenced many subsequent landscape painters to group their cows accordingly.

William Gilpin and the Picturesque in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

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