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Uvedale Price (1747 - 1829)Author of the Essay on the Picturesque (1794), Uvedale Price was a Herefordshire landowner who was at the heart of the 'picturesque debate' of the 1790s. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Price inherited the family estate (Foxley) when he came of age in 1768, a few years after the death of his father (Robert Price) in 1761 and his grandfather (Uvedale Tompkins Price) in 1764. As a young man Price was a figure on London's social scene, and was once described as the 'macaroni of his age', but with his inheritance and his marriage to Lady Caroline Carpenter he settled down at Foxley to tend to the estate and develop his theories on landscape. He shared ideas with his close neighbour Richard Payne Knight, whose poem 'The landscape' was published the same year as Price's Essay delineating his theories on the 'picturesque' as a mode of landscape. For Price the Picturesque lay between the Beautiful and the Sublime; its translation into practical application meant that his preferred mode of landscaping was to retain old trees, rutted paths, and textured slopes, rather than to sweep all these away in the style that had been pracised by Capability Brown. The ideas caught fire and led to much debate in artistic and literary circles: they were parodied, for example, by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Price republished the Essay several times, with additional material, and entered into a public debate with Humphry Repton over the latter's approach to landscape design. He fell out with Payne Knight, whose theories of landcape betrayed a more esoteric attitude, but remained great friends with Sir George Beaumont and his wife Margaret Beaumont, with whom he corresponded extensively. He was also a lifetime friend of CHarles James Fox, an associate of Wordsworth, and in later life a correspondent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He died in 1829 having accepted a knighthood, and having finally printed his work on greek and latin pronounciation.
price, Uvedale
price, Uvedale
