Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was an attempt to analyse aesthetics and split them into rational categories. Burke viewed aesthetics as belonging to two main themes: the masculine ‘sublime’ and the feminine ‘beautiful’. For Burke, the sublime was a feeling associated with pain, terror and the need for self-preservation. Sublime objects were those that invoked a sense of awe due to their ominous presence, for example, mountains, cliffs, thunderstorms and gothic ruins. In contrast, beautiful objects were associated with comfort and pleasure.

Burke’s treatise was influential, and in Britain it came to inspire picturesque ideas of landscapes throughout the late eighteenth century.