Travelling knick-knacks and picturesque points of view: Reverend James Plumptre’s Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey […] to the Highlands of Scotland […] in the Summer of the Year 1799

This essay revisits later eighteenth-century picturesque aesthetics in Britain as they were articulated in theory, applied in practice, and reproduced in travel literature and art. It considers the sometimes congruent, at other times contested, relationship between the natural landscape, written descriptions of that landscape, and its pictorial representation. Focusing on unpublished extracts from Reverend James Plumptre’s manuscript travel journal, Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey […] to the Highlands of Scotland […] in the Summer of the Year 1799, it argues for an original interpretation of the pedestrian picturesque as a suite of practices which entailed travelling by foot, viewing the landscape with a range of hand-held implements or ‘knick-knacks’, and representing nature ‘as seen’ without remedial artistic correction or improvement. According to this account, ‘people, places, and things’ becomes a useful rubric for conceptualising Plumptre’s 1799 pedestrian tour of Scotland which included visits to the Edinburgh studios of artists Alexander Nasmyth, Henry Raeburn, and Hugh William Williams.