It is a style of landscape painting that flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Picturesque landscapes were somewhere between the beautiful and the sublime, not serene, not awe-inspiring, but irregular, pleasing to the eye, and full of interesting detail.
Picturesque painters included the Englishman Thomas Girtin and the Frenchman Gaspard Dughet.
The movement represents a stage between neoclassical regularity and Romantic passion.