Abstract

This chapter focuses on how the geomorphology of the Dolomites, characterized by picturesque involutions and fantastic drifting, elevated them to a pictorial extravaganza on the English art market. The ‘Dolomite picturesque’ was the result of a particular response to landscape initially inscribed onto the English landscape in places like the Lake District. This chapter explores the way in which British tourists imposed on the Dolomite landscape a picturesque signature crafted at home by the poetry of Wordsworth, the paintbrush of Turner, and the spade of Humphrey Repton. The chief exemplar and source for explaining this interchange of the picturesque aesthetic and its practice is the artist Elijah Walton who exploited the so-called ‘Turnerian mystery’ to render the Dolomites iconic for the British art market.

Keywords: picturesque, art market, chromolithography, Lake District, Elijah Walton

What these noble giants want is not simply that somebody should go and look at them […] They want to have picturesque villages and church spires in their valleys; to have zigzag paths traced up their sides by the feet of succeeding generations; to have châlets built on the pastures, and terraced fields creeping up their sides.