Design for the parkland, Esher Place

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...

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...