With the publication in 1778 of A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, antiquarian, writer, and ordained Jesuit priest Thomas West (1720?–1779) contributed to and capitalized on the growing interest in exploring the aesthetic significance of British landscape. The first edition was a success, but West died before seeing the book go into a second, which was expanded and made “decently perspicuous and correct” by the writer William Cockin (1736–1801) (reprinted in 4th ed., London: W. Richardson, 1789, 90). Despite the Guide’s initial success, Cockin included in the preface a curiously belittling description of the late author’s credentials: “Mr. West, late of Ulverston, author of this tract, and also of the Antiquities of Furness, is supposed to have had the chief part of his education on the Continent, where he afterwards presided as a professor in some of the branches of natural philosophy: whence it will appear, that though, upon some account or other, he had not acquired the habit of composing correctly in English, he must nevertheless have been a man of learning” (vi). The ambiguity surrounding West’s qualifications—odd considering he had been born in Inverness and educated in Edinburgh—was perhaps a reflection of Cockin’s attempt to assert his own contribution to the text by drawing attention to the “many imperfections of stile and composition which but too evidently appeared in the first impression” (v). But the application of a foreign gloss could also have been an attempt to conceal that West may have had Caledonian origins, suggesting that there was tension surrounding precisely who was qualified to discuss the “regions in which they exercise their vocation” and, by extension, the picturesque (vi).

The progress of the picturesque in the eighteenth century, from a picture-like quality to an aesthetic ideal, is an area of intense study with far-flung implications. As much a phenomenon to experience as a method to interpret a landscape, the picturesque has been productively explored as a method to render foreign landscapes familiar and familiar landscapes significant. Although developmentally tied to the mid-seventeenth-century Italian pittoresco, the Dutch pittoresk, and later the French pittoresque, the term resonates most deeply in the British context where it was used to signal the importance of land as a subject of study, of thought, and of art. Recent exhibitions including Constable, Turner, Gainsborough and the Making of Landscape (December 8, 2012–February 17, 2013; Royal Academy), Looking at the View (February 12–June 2, 2013; Tate Britain), and the upcoming Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting (March 6–June 1, 2014; Yale Center for British Art) demonstrate an active and persistent interest in British landscape painting in the long eighteenth century, but also suggest that landscape discourse is ready for some fresh ideas. Cockin’s territorial impulse toward the picturesque belies the reality that there were many paths to and from the picturesque.

Finola O’Kane’s Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting, and Tourism, 1700–1840 addresses Ireland’s little-studied influence on European landscape design and stands as a timely intervention in the literature regarding the picturesque. From the outset views of Ireland were heralded as the best examples of picturesque beauty; but, as O’Kane points out, “the picturesque’s ability to appropriate and reconfigure the colonial environment led to an early appreciation of antiquities, ruins, and setting,” demonstrating that picturesque theory may have developed independently and, furthermore, may have taken hold earlier in Ireland than in England (1). As such, the book traces the physical formation of Ireland into a landscape to be viewed.

O’Kane’s first chapter, “Adoring the Country with Ruins,” explores the theoretical underpinnings of the picturesque and how the taste for this aesthetic was developed. Through her discussion of landscape theory, paintings, tour writing, and books of views, O’Kane identifies profound ambivalence between the discourse and activity of landscape improvement and the aesthetic principles of the picturesque, values that often proved to be contradictory to artistic, religious, and nationalistic politics. Through close readings of William Gilpin’s texts, O’Kane reveals that the author was aware of these politics and retreated from firm positions in order to account for an important patron, the development of an English style, or a member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Ruins emerge in O’Kane’s discussion, as well as in the art of landscape painting and landscape design, to provide a useful (though ultimately unstable) agent by which to aestheticize rather than historicize the landscape. Whether to make the land worthy of viewing, to explain away a contentious religious past/present, or to help refashion Anglo-Irish identity, monastic ruins, often through the pretext of the picturesque, helped to counteract the pull of the center.

The second chapter, “The Western Baroque Landscape: Laying out Kerry,” traces the first glimpses of the picturesque in early eighteenth-century Ireland by recreating the landscape of Kerry, identifying precisely when and how it became worthy of becoming a tourist destination. The tight familial alliances between landowners resulted in a relatively cohesive progress of landscape improvement, aesthetics, and the development of tourism. O’Kane situates these “faint stirrings of approval for the wild landscape of the west” in the design decisions made by the custodians of Lixnaw, Ardfert and Leamneh, Dromoland, and Ross Castle/Kenmare House to develop or, indeed, abandon the Baroque landscapes that had been designed and carried out to varying degrees (34). The Crosbies of Ardfert “contrived [the] creation of an antique identity” by building their house close to a monastic ruin (53), while at Lemaney, Donat O’Brien “distinguished himself from the newly landed by retaining and improving his old Irish castle and landscape” (55). At the estate of Dromoland “productive gardening modified Baroque ambition” (60), while Edward Herbert focused on the landscape surrounding his relatively modest house, allowing “Nature to be his chief Gardener” (70).

The third and largest chapter, “The Irish Tours,” explores the methods by which Killarney and the two other chief tours of eighteenth-century Ireland—Dargle Valley and Glenalough in Wicklow and Giant’s Causeway in Antrim—became major tourist destinations, a process in which aesthetics was imbricated with colonial politics. Books of images, O’Kane rightly argues, have been underutilized and even neglected within the analysis of eighteenth-century travel literature. By interrogating these objects, she makes a significant contribution to the debate by suggesting that “aesthetic momentum may have been projected from the periphery towards the centre and not the other way around” (137). Images delivered some of the most profound conquest narratives in the eighteenth century. In books of antiquities text, image, and caption are deployed by the Irish Protestant elite to create a “narrative of the past for use in the present,” while books of views dispensed with the analyses of Irish history altogether, opting instead to “present a positive visual identity” for Ireland and beyond (77). The core of this public-relations campaign was occupied by and reflected in the aesthetic principles of the picturesque. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the choreography of the “tour sequence” (84) had been set, a “dance” that began with the arrival in Ireland from a foreign locale and culminated in Killarney. Painting occupied a central position in this complex process as it encouraged engagement with the landscape and was a tool for working out problems of landscape design. Through extraordinary surviving documents pertaining to the artistic practice of Jonathan Fisher, O’Kane demonstrates how the nobleman’s demesne took a central position in the tourists’ view, while the pacing was established to control their movements. Images were edited in published works to indicate significance, and Fisher’s emphasis on Killarney ensured that the area occupied the pinnacle of the touring experience. Artistic decisions, based on the principles of the picturesque, illustrate the removal of natives and the inclusion of improvements like mines or cottages to balance the “unimproved scene” (100). Most convincingly, O’Kane contends that the degree of participation with tourism was proportional to the necessity for a landowner’s Irish holdings to succeed. The Earl of Shelburne, who had healthy English lands, did not travel over his lands in Ireland for pleasure and was irritated when others did (101–2). These multifarious processes began to isolate tourist destinations from those deemed mercantile, or by extension not picturesque, while proximity to Dublin became an important determinant of tour-ability, as was the case for the Dargle Valley that was “easily visited and easily escaped” (112). Fixed viewpoints, established through painted and printed images, and through the process of sketching en plain air, could lead to sublime conclusions, like a visit to the waterfall, to Lover’s Leap, or to the edge of the glen where in “the distance lay Gleandlough” (120).

The final chapter, “Designing Picturesque Ireland,” explores the influence of the picturesque on demesne and urban design in Ireland and how landscape design in Ireland, in turn, influenced the picturesque. Landowners could hold considerable influence on estate town design. Visual sources have not been utilized to the extent of documentary sources in histories of urban design as the biased viewpoint has been deemed by many as suspect; but O’Kane correctly argues that landscape views were fundamental to designers: “a framed device, by which new projections for the space depicted are tested and planned” (142). Urban design was infused with the aesthetic of the picturesque as representations of land were infused with the picturesque. The bias was a reality, but so was the influence of this partiality on design. In the case of Castlemartyr, “Lord Shannon’s improvements encompassed his estate town in an enfolding embrace” (147–48). Monasterevin, Adare, and Glin “recast their approach routes and their town plans to address the arriving visitor” (149). Furthermore, the letters of Michael Frederick Trench, estate improver and keen devotee of picturesque tours, illustrate how “the educated draughtsman and amateur architect” documented the landscapes and how drawing organized his own analyses (166). Finally, Lady Catherine Charleville’s sketches and paintings disseminated views for and of her castle at Charleville Forest, county Offaly, influencing others to view the landscape through the lens of the picturesque.

This is an important book. O’Kane’s analysis of a significant body of primary source material, which she has identified and contextualized masterfully, is not merely a welcome contribution to the debates on the picturesque. The book is an exemplar of research and synthesis and—properly supported with reproductions of maps, plans, and paintings—will become a foundation for further productive study. There are moments when O’Kane presents the picturesque unproblematically as a cohesive and uncontested category of aesthetic interest, belying John Ruskin’s fitting reflection: “Probably no word in the language, (exclusive of theological express,) has been the subject of so frequent or so prolonged dispute; yet none remain more vague in their acceptance” (The Seven Lamps of Architecture, New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1857, 156). Although O’Kane properly points up Gilpin’s oscillating and often vapid argumentation (with an at times excessive use of quotation), the picturesque’s association with the amateur was not a tension that was scrutinized critically. Furthermore, O’Kane includes two pieces of graphic satire (A Trip to the Dargle or the Pleasures of Jaunting and A View in the Moss House at the Dargle Dun by an Eminent Thatcher) with no sense of how these works may have dialogued with or departed from the critical climate at the center. Furthermore, the imperial utility of the picturesque is a phenomenon that has been productively explored in other so-called peripheral landscapes of the long eighteenth century, and it seems a missed opportunity that the Irish picturesque was not examined in relation to this larger discourse, especially with respect to issues of naturalization and identity formation.¹ Nevertheless, the strength of Ireland and the Picturesque lies in O’Kane’s ability to express intensely complex engagements with landscape aesthetics and the built environment, and her major achievement is privileging the images without distancing her arguments from the texts.