Eight capriccio landscape studies

Gilpin was born in Cumbria, the son of Captain John Bernard Gilpin, who was a soldier and an amateur artist. He enjoyed sketching from an early age, but unlike his brother Sawrey (1733-1807), he chose not to pursue it as a full-time career and opted to join the church, having graduated from Queen's College, Oxford in 1748. At Oxford Gilpin developed his ideas on the picturesque, anonymously publishing A Dialogue upon the Gardens... at Stow in Buckinghamshire (1748). In a unique statement of the time, he illustrated an appreciation of wild and rugged mountain scenery, perhaps derived from his childhood in Cumbria. In 1768 Gilpin published his popular Essay on Prints in which he defined the picturesque as 'that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture', and during the following two decades he travelled extensively, committing his thoughts and spontaneous sketches to notebooks.