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Picturesque ideas suffused English aesthetics during the Georgian period and beyond, to such an extent that the picturesque became the principal way of seeing, understanding and appreciating landscape well into the twentieth century. Picturesque modes of art and design were taken up enthusiastically by followers as diverse as Sir Walter Scott, John Claudius Loudon, the pioneers of the Garden City movement and the town planners of the post-war era. According to Nikolaus Pevsner, Uvedale Price (1747-1829) was "the most brilliant of the theorists of the English Picturesque". Yet until now Price has remained an elusive figure, despite the wide-ranging controversy that his Essay on the Picturesque (1794) produced on its publication.
This is the first full-scale biography of Uvedale Price, bringing out his contradictory and elusive character and revealing an astonishing cast of friends and acquaintances, including Gainsborough, Voltaire, William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It demonstrates how Price's theories, which were to excite polite Georgian society, were grounded both in his personal experience of managing his estate, Foxley, in Herefordshire, and his wide ranging interests in art and ancient and modern literature. It explores the interconnections between Price's different roles: as landowner, landscape designer, art collector, forester, connoisseur, scholar, and correspondent with many of the leading personalities of his day. And in so doing it restores Price's reputation as one of the founders of the English landscaping tradition, alongside contemporaries such as Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight.

Charles Watkins is Professor of Rural Geography, University of Nottingham; Ben Cowell is Assistant Director, External Affairs, National Trust.