painting of a Dutch landscape as the picturesque. During the mid 18th century the idea of purely scenic pleasure touring began to take hold among the English leisured class. This new image disregarded the principles of symmetry and perfect proportions while focusing more on "accidental irregularity," and moving more towards a concept of individualism and rusticity. William Gilpin's work was a direct challenge to the ideology of the well established Grand Tour, showing how an exploration of rural Britain could compete with classically-oriented tours of the Continent. The irregular, anti-classical ruins became sought-after sights. Picturesque-hunters began crowding the Lake District to make sketches using Claude Glasses – tinted portable mirrors to frame and darken the view, and named after the 17th century landscape painter Claude Lorrain, whose work Gilpin saw as synonymous with the picturesque and worthy of emulation. As Malcolm Andrews remarks, there is "something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, 'capturing' wild scenes, and 'fixing' them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing room walls". Gilpin himself asked: "shall we suppose it a greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue a trivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties of nature?" After 1815 when Europe was available to travel again after the wars, new fields for picturesque-hunters opened up in Italy. Anna Jameson wrote in 1820: "Had I never visited Italy, I think I should never have understood the word picturesque", while Henry James exclaimed in Albano in the 1870s: "I have talked of the picturesque all my life; now at last… I see it". The Far East in the discourse on the picturesque Though seemingly vague and far away, the Far East, China and Japan, played a considerable role in inspiring a taste for the picturesque. Sir William Temple (1628–1699) was a statesman and essayist who traveled throughout Europe. His essay Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or Of Gardening, in the Year 1685 described what he called the taste of the "Chineses" [sic] for a beauty without order. Among us [Europeans], the beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in some certain proportions, symmetries, or uniformities; our walks and our trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact distances. The Chineses scorn this way of planting, and say, a