The Picturesque Garden in Europe

John Dixon Hunt has a very good eye. In this most visual of books, the stunning photographs, many of them shot by the author himself at locations across Europe, are juxtaposed with a superb selection of illustrations of eighteenth-century paintings, watercolors, and designs of some of the most celebrated gardens of the age. The result is indeed picturesque, though this book never descends to becoming merely a fancy item to decorate a well provided coffee table.

There are, of course, inherent problems in writing a volume that has simultaneously a popular and an academic appeal, and there are occasions when Hunt, or more likely his series editor, seems to be uncertain who the intended audience really is. When Hunt speaks, for instance, of a “latter-day Archimboldo effect” (174), or the artist’s “so-called Claude glass” (72), or an itinerary that included “a Naumachia or Roman water-theatre” (121), he risks losing the general reader, who will probably need more context to make fuller sense of these references. Conversely, the academic or specialist reader will find it frustrating to come across an allusion to Stendhal’s mistaken belief that the term “picturesque” was English rather than Italian in its origin (8), or to Uvedale Price’s “snide” relegation of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown “to the category of house-painter” (76), without the inclusion of direct footnote citations to their precise sources.

That having been said, Hunt’s consummate knowledge of and enthusiasm for his subject matter more than compensate for the difficulty of gauging his readership. Equally, the thematic arrangement of the book greatly helps the reader to gain a widened insight into the influence of “picturesque,” or sometimes “English,” gardening aesthetics and practice across Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hunt’s albeit brief prefatory remarks (two pages) are intelligent and pointed. He begins by acknowledging that “picturesque” has become today a “rather limp” (6) term, but shows that its original meaning contained within it a fundamental contradiction that is inherent in the perceived difference between nature and art. “Picturesque” concerns both what Hunt calls “the application of painterly art to the formation of gardens and landscapes” and the “presentation and augmentation of ‘nature’ in designed landscapes” (ibid).

The novelty and insecurity of the term in the middle years of the eighteenth century is evident from the fact that Samuel Johnson omitted its definition from the 1755 first edition of the Dictionary, though curiously he employs it in his explanation of the adverb graphically, defined as, “In a picturesque manner; with a good description or delineation.” Although the linking of the picturesque with the “painterly” is the more literal interpretation of the term, its “natural” associations were far more in evidence by the end of the century, when (as Hunt explains it) “a picturesque landscape could involve a cluster of other elements as well, among which were irregularity, roughness, surprise and variety, a rich and busy palette of natural materials, historical associations, and other forms of mental and emotional stimulation” (ibid). However, Hunt’s seemingly casual employment of “palette” here shows how well he understands that, for all its natural appeal, the picturesque in its heyday never entirely forgot its artistic or painterly origins. The interplay of art and nature that was energized by debate about the meaning and interpretation of the picturesque created an extraordinary spectrum of diverse garden forms and designs across Europe in the era under consideration in this book. What becomes apparent from the broad perspective so ably supplied by Hunt is that, despite the reiterative claim of indebtedness to “English” garden design, the manifestations of the picturesque in different countries across the continent almost invariably assume their own particular national or local identities.

Hunt’s three opening chapters concentrate on key aspects of the English picturesque. In chapter 1, “What, How and When Was the Picturesque Garden?,” he acknowledges at once the capaciousness of the label, and that “English,” “modern,” “rococo,” “natural,” and “informal” often serve indiscriminately as near synonymous terms in horticultural description. After paying sound lip service to Addison’s well-known contribution to the aesthetics of gardening in his “Pleasures of the Imagination” essays and to Pope, who considered that “all gardening is landscape-painting,” Hunt turns his attention to the architect and dramatist, Sir John Vanbrugh, plausibly suggesting that the “fake battlements and bastions” (25) on the approach to Castle Howard in Yorkshire (pictured in the book) owe not a little to the design of theater scenery. Intriguingly, here, he alludes briefly to similar visual analogies in the work of Thomas Whately and William Kent, opening up at once a hitherto relatively unexplored area of enquiry, linking theater and landscape design.

The second chapter surveys the early English picturesque as evidenced in the work of William Kent at (among other places) Chiswick House, Rousham in Oxfordshire, and Stowe in Buckinghamshire, and of Lancelot Brown, whose work might be taken as central to the picturesque, “if picturesque were simply taken as ‘natural’” (38), as also of a number of mainly lesser known practitioners. The final chapter devoted to England, “The Picturesque Climax: Theory and Practice” takes us though the “famous names” (60) of the late eighteenth century, particularly William Gilpin, Richard Payne Knight, and Uvedale Price. In these chapters, even when dealing with material that is already pretty familiar turf to present-day garden historians, Hunt frequently intrigues us with unexpected pictorial and verbal nuggets, such as the reproduction taken from a private collection of a charming gouache by Thomas Robins of gardeners at work on the lawn at Woodside in Berkshire, with a picturesque Chinese gazebo behind them (55), or the revelation that Uvedale Price aspired to extend picturesque as a category to include the musical works of Scarlatti and Haydn (76).

Unquestionably, though, the most innovative aspect of Hunt’s study is his foray into continental Europe in the final three chapters, which include diverse examples of the picturesque from such parts as Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, and Germany. Here, he devotes one chapter to the other “key player” (7) in picturesque gardening, namely France, guiding us through, among other places, the rococo splendor of the gardens devised for the ex-King of Poland, Stanislaus Leszczinski, at Lunéville, and the contrivance of “a meadowland with lakes and wandering streams, a classical Temple of Love on an island ensconced in fragrant shrubs and flowers” (130), as conceived by Queen Marie Antoinette at le Petit Trianon. He takes us into the vogue for things English (Anglomanie) that beset France in the years following the Seven Years’ War, noting the opinion of a contemporary German horticultural theorist, Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld, that the English mode of garden art is “negligent or uncultivated, as displaying a love of the countryside,” whereas “the French, by contrast, were more inclined towards the city and took it with them into their gardens, which were decorative and ornamental” (98). Something of the same distinction between nature and art that we saw in early definitions of the picturesque seems evident in the dissimilarity observed here between English and French styles.

In tracing the “English” manner across the European continent, Hunt also brings literary influences to the fore, one commentator of 1805 finding such eclecticism in a Viennese estate to make it the “architectural equivalent” of Tristram Shandy or Hudibras (174), and an amateur architect in Poland in 1774, proposing to the monarch an ornamental garden that would include a “Robinson Crusoe’s hut” (177). In all these and other examples, it is apparent that the avowed “English” inspiration rarely made such gardens anything other than “perfectly indigenous creations” (136). It is here, perhaps, that the influence of the English picturesque is at its most tenuous, since the label could rarely be rigorously applied. But perhaps that didn’t matter. For, as John Dixon Hunt remarks in his conclusion to The Picturesque Garden in Europe, the real appeal of the picturesque garden was in its ability to activate the human imagination, creating links between the eyes and the mind that “put landscape architecture at the service of the fullest possible human experience” (195).