
Ellen Harvey
Taking its title from William Gilpin’s late-eighteenth-century philosophy of the landscape, Ellen Harvey’s exhibition “Picturesque Pictures” cleverly demonstrates that the now ubiquitous tangle between representation and reality has quite a long history indeed. Gilpin’s measure of beauty—rooted in the tradition of landscape painting—was based on how closely a scene correlated to established landscape conceits, thereby positing preexisting images as the grounds for aesthetic appraisal of the natural world.
Gilpin’s ideas find new life in Harvey’s parodic Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque