Picturesque
Topic: Peasant and Tribal Resistance under Company Rule · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 1 "Colonialism and the Countryside"
Meaning
The picturesque was an eighteenth-century style of seeing and painting landscapes, linked with Romanticism. Romanticism was an artistic movement that valued nature and feeling. Picturesque artists found beauty in rough, irregular, wild and little-known places, not just in neat, orderly scenes. British artists in India used this style. It shaped how British people at home imagined the Indian countryside.
Example
William Hodges toured the Rajmahal hills in 1782 and painted them as peaceful, idyllic scenes. Yet British officials thought the same hills were wild and dangerous, the home of Paharias who raided the plains.
Don't confuse with
- Aquatint: a printing technique that uses a copper plate etched with acid. The picturesque is an artistic ideal, and an aquatint is one of the ways such images were printed.
Related concepts
- Paharia
- Rajmahal hills
- Shifting cultivation
- Augustus Cleveland
- Paharia pacification policy
- Stipendiary chief
- William Hodges
- Aquatint