Richard Payne Knight of Downton Castle in Herefordshire, and of 5 Soho Square, London, England, was a classical scholar, connoisseur, archaeologist and numismatist best known for his theories of picturesque beauty and for his interest in ancient phallic imagery. He served as a Member of Parliament for Leominster (1780–84) and for Ludlow (1784–1806).
Portrait of Payne Knight by Sir Thomas Lawrence
Bust of Payne Knight (1812) by John Bacon the Younger in the British Museum
Four figures from Discourse on the worship of Priapus and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients as republished by George Witt in 1865
An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786).
Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's leisured travellers to examine "the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty". Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century.
A view of the Roman Campagna from Tivoli, evening by Claude Lorrain, 1644–1645
The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window by J. M. W. Turner, 1794
An Artist Studying from Nature by Claude Lorrain 1639
Villa Doria park in Albano Laziale
