Observations on the River Wye, by William Gilpin
Observations on the River Wye, by William Gilpin
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Hardback – 127 x 184 mm – 96 pages
ISBN 9781843681977
250th Anniversary Edition, to accompany the year-long Gilpin 2020 Festival of talks, exhibitions, guided walks, and more.
In the summer of 1770, the influential educationalist William Gilpin took a trip down the Wye Valley, recording his impressions as he went. The result was his beautifully original and witty travel narrative, Observations on the River Wye, which changed British tourism forever and gave birth to the picturesque movement.
The Observations was first published in 1782, was continually reprinted throughout the romantic period. Widely credited as the first English guidebook, it started a fashion for tourism that relished the ‘picturesque’ beauty of landscape, rather than only its history or architecture. It inspired many accounts by the great names of romanticism, with Wordsworth, Turner, and Coleridge all following in Gilpin’s wake.
Pallas Athene has produced the first new edition of the book in 200 years. Lavishly illustrated with Gilpin’s idealised aquatint drawings, it is an elegant, opinionated pilgrimage of taste. An introduction by Richard Humphreys, lead curator of the ‘A Picture of Britain’ exhibition at Britain, puts this fascinating work into perspective.