John Dixon Hunt
John Dixon Hunt is Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape at the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.
Hunt, John Dixon
Hunt, John Dixon
United States of America
Subscribed to the newsletter
Send me site notifications emails
Description: William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain
FAMOUS AS WILLIAM KENT IS in the history of English landscaping, one of the main difficulties with grasping the significance and extent of his designs is that most assessments of his work are based on his architectural insertions into landscapes and not on the landscapes themselves. This is understandable on three counts: the structures are often remarkable and important in their own right; they...
PublisherBard Graduate Center
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.365-388
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00218.014
Description: The Architecture of Western Gardens: A Design History from the Renaissance to the...
The picturesque vogue of the eighteenth century has come to be seen as a phenomenon of garden and landscape taste. While this may be true of its later phase, such an emphasis distorts its earlier history, with the consequence that much discussion of the beginnings of landscape gardening in the first fifty...
PublisherMIT Press
Related print edition pages: pp.231-239
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00122.035
Description: Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00056
John Dixon Hunt is widely considered one of the foremost writers on the history and theory of gardens and landscape architecture. Gardens and the Picturesque collects 11 of Hunt's essays—several of them never before published—that deal with the ways in which men and women have given meaning to gardens and landscapes, especially with the ways in which gardens have represented the world of nature "picturesquely." Ranging over subjects from the cult of the picturesque to verbal-visual parallels within gardens, from allegorical imagery to landscape painting, these essays brilliantly invoke Hunt's fascination with the idea of the garden both as a milieu—by which gardens become the most eloquent expressions of complex cultural ideas—and as a site of cultural translation, whereby one period shapes for its own purposes the ideas and forms inherited from its predecessors. From Castle Howard in Yorkshire to French impressionist gardens the essays deal with several crucial aspects of the picturesque controversy, how practical applications of the Picturesque taste affected people's treaty with and experience of landscape gardens and even the larger landscape—this last is tracked through the work of the great painter J. M. W. Turner and his talented commentator, John Ruskin, as well as through the garden designs of Humphry Repton and the lingering debts to the picturesque movement that haunt modernist theory. The book concludes with a consideration of the utopian aspirations and views of the garden in different societies.
PublisherMIT Press
Print publication date June 1992 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780262082112
EISBN 9780300241327
Illustrations 131 Illus.
Print Status out of print