Colonial Violence and the Picturesque

Abstract

This essay explores ways in which picturesque discourse, a popular means of representing the domestic landscape of Great Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sustained and aided colonial violence. Analysis of the ideas and actions of Sri Lanka’s first British governor, Frederic North, in relation to the work of picturesque theorists and artists in Britain and South Asia, reveals a close relationship between the goals of imperial agents and the ideals of metropolitan aesthetes, particularly in the matter of colonial contestation of land. Analyzed here are images by Colin Mackenzie, Robert Home, Samuel Daniell, and William Lyttleton, all of whom carefully enfolded military accoutrements into the colonized landscape, effectively naturalizing the process of conquest.