The English landscape garden 1680-1760
Its distinctive preference for sweeping lawns, gently wooded valleys and meandering rivers as the setting for Greek temples or Gothic pavilions was acknowledged across Europe as a style developed within England.
Mix of landscaping, planting and buildings
Shift from overt manipulation and control of nature to an aesthetic that prioritised an apparently natural appearance took place gradually over the decades 1680–1760
Garden design became part of a wider visual culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century England.
Horace Walpole - Poetry, Painting and Gardening, The Three New Graces.
Political commentaries reflected on and were enacted through garden design.
Garden as an immersive artwork.
Discourses about how people see their world are expressed in a variety of ways beyond talking or writing about them. People who share the same discourse on a topic broadly agree about assumptions and values. ‘discourse’, the expression of world views.
Stephanie Ross - the garden as a stage, with performers, owners and visitors to appear as ‘ 'players’ and ‘audiences’ .

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) - author of The Tatler and The Spectator
Nature and art. Enhance nature rather than dominate it.
Contrast to overtly manicured and structured Geometric gardens
Horace Walpole -  Walpole identified a shift away from formality (‘symmetrical and unnatural gardens’) to naturalistic styles (based on park landscapes).
Design related to composition in painting.
William Kent (1685–1748) artist and garden designer.
The word ‘landscape’ at this time used to mean ‘landscape painting’, only later did it come to be used to describe the topography of the natural environment, thought of as a three- dimensional composition.
Claude Lorrain's Landscape with an Imaginary View of Tivoli .
Both Castle Howard and Stowe have temple-like buildings inspired by Tivoli.
Poussin was also an influence.

Het Loo and Versailles: examples of late geometric gardens, influenced Hampton court, all examples of Court gardens with royal patrons, Louis XIV and William III.
Function:  demonstrating the rank, magnificence and power of their patrons than the majority of gardens attached to landed estates.

Wrest Park, Kent, Henry Earl of Kent - Late Geometric
1680-1730 is typified by ‘Late Geometric’ (e.g. Hampton Court Palace, Versailles), and is seen at Wrest Park. Late Geometric is characterised by straight lines of trees, topiary, geometric outlines to block planting and elaborate patterns within planted areas. Enclosed areas became ‘green rooms’. The architectural nature of ‘green rooms’ created within the woodland garden areas at Wrest derived from high clipped hedges, a carpet of grass, and furnishings of seats and statuary.
Medieval use of moats and fishponds as decorative garden components, walled enclosures as natural extensions of late medieval courtyard houses, and deer parks as controlled areas of the farming landscape

Surviving archive of historic images, which are used here to demonstrate the use of visual analysis for garden history. Primary sources for closely datable phases in landscape design
Dutch and French influence, Dutch favoured multiple enclosed spaces, topiary, single bulbs and water channels for drainage. French favoured a hierarchy of elaboration with the greatest degree of elaboration nearest the house
The gardens at Wrest Park were drawn and engraved by Knyff and Kip, good primary sources. 1707 published images.
Linear water feature, highly organised around walled compartments, symmetrical, with
detailed small-scale planting and many decorative elements such as pots and statues, the gardens set off the regular grid of the newly classical house. The compartments to the side and to the rear of the house are laid out in ornamental patterns created by grass, shaped beds of earth and plants, a type of garden called a parterre (from the French, meaning 'ground’, ‘floor’). There are clear distinctions between formal gardens around the house, design features within the park, and the boundary to the wider landscape, typical of the settings for English country houses around 1700.  Concentric circles and patterns.
Addison’s call for an artful approach to nature in the garden
Pleasure gardens extended, Baroque architecture added, pavillion.
The Wrest Park gardens in their 1707 appearance are an example of what Addison was reacting against.

Castle Howard, Yorkshire, Charles Howard (1669-1738) third Earl of Carlisle.
There are three buildings referring to three different historical periods: Egypt (pyramid), ancient classical (mausoleum) and Renaissance (temple).
New interest in breaking up formal and symmetrical layouts and in creating dramatic settings for architecture in landscapes.
Castle Howard is set out like a picture.The pyramid, temple and mausoleum all represent something of Carlisle’s discourse, rather than only being ancient idealisation.
The house was developed when he was worldly and successful; the surroundings when he was in rural contemplation mode.
What he created there expresses his dissent from the dominant politics.
Castle Howard as an early example in England of a type of landscape design more commonly seen after the 1730s: monumental architecture set within increasingly informal woodland planting.
Could Carlisle’s political disappointments be encoded in the landscape? The principal l landscape developments to consider here are the ‘naturalistic’ design of Ray Wood and the development of the old deer park as an architectural landscape.
Carlisle rejected initial plans for Ray wood to be redesigned in the late geometric style and went with an informal design, accounts list a perimeter wall, seats, fountain, a summerhouse, and statues of Flora, Venus, Diana, Apollo and other classical figures.
Serpentine woodland walks with surprise elements along the route.
Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor collaborated with Carlisle to create architectural features around the park, as areas of aesthetic interest. Temple of the Winds, the Mausoleum and the Pyramid.
The visitor also traverses time and space through visual references.
Neil Levine, art hostorian, notes that the three buildings refer to three historical architectural periods: Egyptian, ancient classical (the mausoleum was modelled on the Roman Temple of Vesta, Tivoli,
For Levine it is the ability of the Castle Howard buildings to be viewed as ‘picturelike’ that is crucial since they are set out as if grouped in a picture. Levine goes further and asserts that architecture in a landscape setting had greater claims to represent philosophical ideals than words or paint.

	Created by Dearbhla Dunne almost 10 years ago

Book 2 Part 1: City and country 1660-1760 Note on Notes - Chpt 4 B2 P1, created by Dearbhla Dunne on 29/05/2014.

Notes - Chpt 4 B2 P1