Week 6

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11 & 12: LANDSCAPE GARDENS

 

Before the 18^th century, the gardens of palaces and stately homes were treated as an extension of the planning of the architecture, asserting the owner’s control over his land. At the villas of Italy and the chateaux of France, grand vistas were created, with long avenues, elaborate waterworks and symmetrical planting. Trees were shaped though topiary, and hedges and shrubs shaped into parterres.

 

A different form emerged in England during the 18^th century, with the emergence of the so-called landscape garden – the Jardin Anglais. These gardens were less formal in layout, preferring asymmetry and curvilinear forms, with ‘natural’ forms of trees, shrubs, streams and lakes, so that gardens merged with the surrounding countryside. Of course these forms were also ‘man-made’, designed to create the illusion of natural landscapes, and often exorbitantly expensive to construct, though less labour-intensive once they were established. The gardens were often closely related to admired landscape paintings, like those of Claude, and might also include historical and literary allusions, particularly through sculptures and garden architecture.

 

Gardens like these must have seemed very wasteful to rural people whose access to land was being increasingly restricted by the policy of enclosure in the 18^th century, when the old ‘common’ land, used by poorer folk for foraging and grazing, was being fenced off by landlords for agricultural development, and the ownership of land was being consolidated in the hands of the privileged few, who owned enormous estates, an indication of their wealth and power.

 

Because the ability to move around a garden and see it under different light and weather effects is so important, we will be viewing some excerpts from a BBC TV series on the English Garden.

 

Checklist of selected garden designers:

William Kent (1685-1748)

Charles Bridgeman (d. 1738)

Lancelot (Capability) Brown (1716-1783)

Humphry Repton (1752-1818)

 

11 & 12 READINGS

A number of books on the development of the landscape garden are available, particularly in the Architecture Library. On short loan in Fine Arts Library are:

Hunt, John Dixon. The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and Gardens during the 18^th  Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989.

Hunt, John Dixon and Willis, Peter. The genius of the place: the English landscape garden 1620-1820. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993.

Mosser, Monique and Teysott, Georges (eds.) The architecture of western gardens: a design history from the Renaissance to the present day. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.

Williamson, Tom. Polite Landscapes: gardens and society in eighteenth-century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995.

Slide List Lecture 11: LANDSCAPE GARDENS

 

Early English gardens:

1  Llanerch, Denbighshire. c 1662.

2  Pierrepont House, Nottinghamshire. c 1705.

 

French 17^th century:

3  Versailles: vista with fountains, Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s Hamlet

4  Vaux-le Vicomte: parterres

5  Villandry

 

English 18^th century:

6  Hampton Court

7  Longleat (Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown)

8  Chiswick (Burlington, Bridgeman and Kent)

9  Pope’s Garden at Twickenham (plan by John Searle)

10 Blenheim (Vanbrugh, Brown)

11 Rousham (Kent)

12 Shugborough (garden architecture: Doric Temple, Tower of the Winds, Monument of Lysicrates, Chinese Pavilion, Gothic ruin)

13 Stowe (Bridgeman, Kent and Brown)

14 Stourhead (Henry Hoare; based on Virgil’s Aeneid)

 

Excerpt from Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Burlington

 

                        To build, to plant, whatever you intend,

            To rear the column, or the arch to bend,

            To swell the terrace, or to sink the grot,

            In all, let Nature never be forgot,

            But treat the goddess like a modest fair,

            Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;

            Let not each beauty everywhere be spied,

            Where half the skill is decently to hide.

            He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,

            Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds.

                        Consult the genius of the place in all:

            That tells the waters or to rise or fall;

            Or helps the ambitious hill the heavens to scale,

            Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;

            Calls in the country, catches opening glades,

            Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades;

            Now breaks, or now directs, the intending lines;

            Paints, as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

            Still follow sense, of every art the soul,

            Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole,

            Spontaneous beauties all around advance,

            Start ev’n from difficulty, strike from chance;

            Nature shall join you; Time shall make it grow

            A work to wonder at - perhaps a Stowe.