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Description: Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture
~This volume gathers together six essays published between 1971 and 1985, one published in an Italian translation in 1990, and four hitherto unpublished lectures of recent years, revised for this collection. Together they offer analyses of various moments in garden history, and specifically of the relationship of gardens, garden design, and garden theory to various...
PublisherMIT Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00056.003
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Preface
This volume gathers together six essays published between 1971 and 1985, one published in an Italian translation in 1990, and four hitherto unpublished lectures of recent years, revised for this collection. Together they offer analyses of various moments in garden history, and specifically of the relationship of gardens, garden design, and garden theory to various cultural phenomena—in particular the cult of the picturesque, but also traditions of verbal-visual parallels, allegorical imagery and other languages of description, landscape painting, and paintings of gardens.
The rationale for their sequence here is largely historical. To have ordered them in the chronology of their composition would have been of merely biographical interest; to have tried to discover in them some deep and subtle pattern would have been merely ingenious. Instead, it seemed best to let them unfold in roughly chronological sequence of their topics, though with some grouping by theme.
Thus, after an introduction which addresses some of the issues involved in writing about what one sees in various types of landscape, the first part gathers together five essays on English gardens in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second part extends the consideration of picturesque strategies into general landscape studies, though with specific focus upon both John Ruskin’s and J. M. W. Turner’s affinities with landscape gardening and landscape architecture. A third part, comprising two recent and unpublished pieces, explores both new forms of picturesque in French impressionist pictures of gardens and the way its old forms haunt modernist thinking about garden design. An essay on the utopian dimension of gardens, though without direct links with the preceding themes, seemed to furnish a postscript on the poetic idea of the garden that is indirectly addressed throughout the volume.
One reason for bringing together these various writings was that, like the utopian garden piece, many have appeared in places where those primarily concerned with the study of landscape architecture would not necessarily look. Though my interests in gardens began within literary studies, which therefore explains some of their emphases and perspectives as well as their original places of publication, my work has gradually discovered its own directions and has come to be concerned, for better or for worse, with garden and landscape history and analysis for their own sakes. This volume, through the enterprising auspices of Roger Conover and the MIT Press, therefore offers itself in the first instance—as its subtitle proclaims—to students of landscape architecture.
“Theatre, Gardens and Garden-Theatres” originally appeared in Essays and Studies, published by the English Association, 1980; “Emblem and Expression[ism] in the Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden” came out in Eighteenth-Century Studies (1971); “Ut Pictura Poesis, Ut Pictura Hortus, and the Picturesque” appeared in the inaugural issue of Word & Image (1985); the essay on Humphry Repton was published in the journal then called Studies in Burke and His Times (1978); “Picturesque Mirrors and the Ruins of the Past” in Art History (1981); the Ruskin essay in Modern Language Notes (1978); an Italian version of the Turner essay in Eidos (1990); “Gardens in Utopia: Utopia in the Garden” appeared in Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia, edited by Dominic Baker-Smith and C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Ridolfi, 1987). The text of “Castle Howard Revisited” has grown directly out of the Leventritt Lecture in Art History given at Harvard University in 1989, while the essay on impressionist gardens first came into existence as the 1990 Bakwin Lecture in the History of Art at Wellesley College; to both those institutions I am grateful for the opportunity to develop ideas and to reprint versions of those lectures here. For their careful scrutiny of the essays on Castle Howard and Turner, I am much indebted to Christopher Ridgway and Andrew Wilton respectively.