Description

William Gilpin (1724-1804) invented a way of looking. His tours, of which this is the most influential, taught a generation to judge a landscape as if it were a painting — to look for the foreground, the side-screen, the distance — and sent the English middle classes into the Lakes with sketchbooks in hand.The Observations of 1772, published in 1792, are the foundation text of the picturesque, and the direct ancestor of Lakeland tourism.This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1792 London (R. Blamire) edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.