03 — ARTWORK
Exterior view
- MEDIUM
- Photo
- TYPE
- Other
PALETTE
HOVER OR TAP A SWATCH FOR NAME, SHARE AND HEX. SAMPLED FROM THE IMAGE — INDICATIVE, NOT A PIGMENT ANALYSIS.
THIS REPRODUCTION DOWNLOAD THE FULL FILE ↓
- FILE
- 1400 × 933 px · JPEG
COMMENTARY
UNDERLINED TERMS ARE DEFINED IN THE GLOSSARY.
Built between 1518 and 1527, the Château d'Azay-le-Rideau is considered one of the foremost examples of early French Renaissance architecture. Set on an island in the middle of the Indre river, this picturesqueTerm covering a set of attitudes towards landscape, both real and painted, that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It indicated an aesthetic approach that found pleasure in roughness and irregularity, and an attempt was made to establish it as a critical category between the 'beautiful' and the 'Sublime'. Picturesque scenes were thus neither serene (like the beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime), but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures — medieval ruins were quintessentially Picturesque. Natural scenery tended to be judged in terms of how closely it approximated to the paintings of favoured artists such as Gaspard Dughet, and in 1801 the Supplement to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by George Mason defined 'Picturesque as: 'what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from.' The Picturesque Tour in search of suitable subjects was a feature of English landscape painting of the period, exemplified, for example, in the work of Girtin and (early in his career) of Turner, and the Picturesque generated a large literary output; much of it was pedantic and obsessive and it became a popular subject for satire. château has become one of the most popular of the châteaux of the Loire.
View the <a href="#" onClick="w=window.open ('/support/plans/zzzarchi/16c/2/azay.html', 'newWin', 'scrollbars=yes,status=no,dependent=yes,screenX=0,screenY=0,width=400,height=600');w.opener=this;w.focus();return false">plan</a> of Château, Azay-le-Rideau.
CITE THIS RECORD — BIBTEX
@online{wga-re78c8a6b2c67cb,
author = {Krén, Emil and Marx, Daniel},
title = {Exterior view by ARCHITECT, French},
organization = {{Web Gallery of Art}},
date = {2026-09-09},
url = {https://beta.wga.hu/artists/architect-french-rdae55df3ad7702/exterior-view-re78c8a6b2c67cb},
urldate = {2026-09-09},
langid = {english}
}ACCESSED 2026-09-09. REPLACE THE AUTHOR FIELD WITH THE COMMENTARY AUTHOR WHERE ONE IS NAMED.
