The Changing Garden: Four Centuries of European and American Art

Something there is that loves a garden, to adapt a line from Frost’s “Mending Wall,” and The Changing Garden: Four Centuries of European and American Art provides ample proof of such love. The volume is the fruit of a 2003 exhibition of garden drawings, paintings, prints, and photographs at (and often from) Stanford’s Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, an exhibition that at the date of this writing has begun its travels to two other sites: Memphis and Ann Arbor. Chronicling garden production and reception in Europe and America over the last five centuries (despite the subtitle, it also contains material on the sixteenth century), the book offers a potted history of gardens and parks that features not only the removal of Frost’s hated walls but the transformation from, as the catalogue puts it, “a self-conscious use of the garden as theatrical backdrop for social and political display in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the garden as a place of enjoyment, health, and refuge that admits a greater variety of activities and behaviors in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries,” and, in its manifestation as a park, as an “enlightened and democratized” place welcoming “people from all walks of life” (199). The book is divided into two parts: six essays on topics related to gardens, landscapes, and their representations, the first of which functions as an introduction to the volume as a whole and to garden studies more generally; and the exhibition catalogue itself, organized topically. Of interest to students of the eighteenth century will be the volume’s pre-history of European gardens in the Renaissance, its attention to eighteenth-century French and English gardens, and its tracing of the ways in which eighteenth-century garden aesthetics and debates, along with some of the gardens, have survived to the present day.

For the most part, the essays in the first section respond to the call from the dean of garden studies, John Dixon Hunt, in Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (2000) for a new history of gardens and landscape architecture to focus less on styles and more on uses of gardens. Uses, of course, include both reception and representation. How have actual people experienced these diversely molded landscapes? And how has reception been influenced by representation? After all, like all representations, the garden as representation of things other than itself (nature, human nature, the relationship between the two; region, culture, and nation; owners, their social status and politics–to name just a few) and representations of the garden in word and image involve the perils of interpretation, the gaps between representation and reality.

Betsy Fryberger’s introduction to The Changing Garden, titled “The Artist and the Changing Garden” (usefully supplemented by the catalogue’s “Historic Gardens” section), delivers in short space the outlines of a history of gardens and their representations in the West from 1500 to 2000–charting their transformation from “artificial” geometry to “natural” irregularity, from walled hortus conclusus to open landscape garden and public park–and as such will bring a general audience up to speed very quickly with the discipline and concerns of garden studies, taking stock not just of the history-of-styles approach to the translatio horti from Italy to France to England to the United States, but also of the history of uses and representations envisioned by Hunt and others. Claudia Lazzaro’s “Representing the Social and Cultural Experience of Italian Gardens in Prints” is the first of two essays that investigate the pivotal role of garden prints as representations that influence reception of gardens and their owners. Beginning with a series of paintings of Medici villas, she rehearses the present state of knowledge about Renaissance Italian gardens and then charts a shift within garden prints from bird’s-eye to ground-level views as the market for prints grew.

The next two essays offer more of relevance to those working in the long eighteenth century. In “The Garden Print as Propaganda, 1573-1683,” Elizabeth S. Eustis also treats different kinds of perspective in prints but attends more closely to the translation of Italian garden design and printmaking to France, where Jean-Baptiste Colbert played an important role in disseminating prints of Louis XIV’s splendid new absolutist gardens at Versailles and elsewhere. By contrast, Diana Ketcham’s “Méréville: Late Masterwork of the Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden in France” considers the translation to France of the picturesque English landscape garden, concentrating on the unjustly neglected estate of Jean-Joseph Laborde, Louis XVI’s last financier, at Méréville. One of the later French innovations upon the English style involved something of a return to the Augustan style, an earlier eighteenth-century English garden style that, among other things, incorporated faux-Roman structures at the end of carefully constructed walks or vistas. In arguing for the ruins painter Hubert Robert’s involvement in the planning of Méréville, Ketcham offers important speculations about the disparities between historical gardens and their depictions in paintings and prints, some of which function more as plans than as exact copies of finished products.

The last two essays turn to the United States. Carol M. Osborne’s “City Parks and Private Gardens in Paintings of Modern America, 1875-1920” examines the democratization of American parks and gardens and the Impressionist influence on images of them by American painters such as Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase. Finally, Paula Deitz’s “Resurrection: The Built Landscapes of George Hargreaves” describes a contemporary American landscape architect’s transformation of “postindustrial derelict lands” such as Byxbee Park in Palo Alto and Crissy Field in San Francisco into works of art that honor their “previous histories” (75).

The three subdivisions of the exhibition catalogue that follow (“Designing Gardens,” “Historic Gardens,” and “Garden Gatherings”) also respond to Hunt’s call for a more topics- and reception-based rather than styles-based history of landscape architecture as well as for more attention to human figures in the landscape. The first observes forces large and small in garden design: “prospects and plans”; “parterres, mazes, and hedges”; “textures, shapes, and colors”; “water displays; “statuary and vases”; “structural features”; and “gardeners at work.” The second provides quick biographies of celebrated European landscape gardens and parks (the most interesting to long eighteenth-centuryists being Vaux-le-Vicomte, Versailles, Stowe, Windsor Great Park, the Désert de Retz, Ermenonville, Méréville, and London’s St. James’s, Hyde, and Regent’s Parks) as well as Central Park in New York, along with often evocative visual representations from different periods that offer hints of a reception history of each site. The third section focuses less on parks and gardens than on the people in them, covering “festive occasions”; “fashionable outings and promenades”; “intimate gatherings”; “domestic scenes”; and “activities, games, and sports.”

Besides the eighteenth-century gardens already mentioned, the catalogue provides brief, usually one-print glimpses of French gardens–such as those at Fontainebleau, Marly, Liencour, the Tuileries, Parc Monceau, Perpignan, and Arcueil–and of Jean-Honore Fragonard’s and Jean-Antoine Watteau’s visions of French and other gardens. Along the way a delightful print of a masked ball at Versailles in 1745 shows Louis XV and his party costumed as pruned yew trees from the gardens. Some of Enlightenment England’s gardens receive the same level of attention: Blenheim, Stourhead, Chiswick, West Wycombe Park, Denham Place, as well as the public pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. While perhaps gesturing towards Hunt’s topics-based approach to garden history, the catalogue entry on the gardens at Stowe neglects the nuances of the existing styles-based approach, simply labeling Stowe picturesque (166-7), when, in fact, Stowe served over the course of the eighteenth century as a barometer of virtually all its styles, including the Augustan, Serpentine, and Picturesque–flawed and teleological as those designations are. The entry also displays such factual blemishes as describing its owner, the Opposition Whig Sir Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham (1675-1749), as “anti-Whig” (166) rather than anti-Walpole, and his nephew Gilbert West’s 1732 poem about Stowe as written in “mock-heroic couplets” (168) rather than heroic couplets. Even fewer, mostly one-off glimpses appear of gardens in eighteenth-century Holland, Italy, and Portugal, and none of German gardens. In sum, Fryberger and company provide a fine introduction to the concerns and practice of garden studies, which because of its more extensive coverage of France may prove more useful to dixhuitiemistes than to eighteenth-centuryists.