Picturesque

adj. resembling a picture, suitable for a painting

Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal first introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations of the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's leisured travelers to examine "the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty". Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century.
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Adjective
1. suggesting or suitable for a picture; pretty as a picture; "a picturesque village"
(similar) beautiful
2. strikingly expressive; "a picturesque description of the rainforest"
(similar) colorful

(a.)
Forming, or fitted to form, a good or pleasing picture; representing with the clearness or ideal beauty appropriate to a picture; expressing that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture, natural or artificial; graphic; vivid; as, a picturesque scene or attitude; picturesque language.
  

term referring to conceptional scenes of pleasant character and nostalgic tendencies - compare Hudson river school - the french term is pittoresque

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