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Augustan busts at Chiswick House in West
London
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The reason for describing this style as the 'Augustan' is that
it was closely connected with the English Augustans and their
poetry. As Horace and Virgil had celebrated the first Augustan age
of peace and security after a period of civil war, so the English
Augustans welcomed a second golden age after the troubles of the
seventeenth century.
Writers, artists, architects, gardeners and a host of others
sought to relive and make anew the glories of Rome in the time of
its first emperor, who said, according to Suetonius 'I found Rome
built of sun-dried bricks; I leave her clothed in marble' Edward
Gibbon's version was that he, 'found the city built of brick, and
left it built of marble'. Augustus'
reign from 27 BC to 14 AD saw a great flowering of the arts. In
eighteenth century England, Palladian architetcure, heroic couplets
and the Augustan garden were products of looking
backwards.
Alexander
Pope was the greatest of the new Augustan poets and had a
decisive effect on garden design. He wrote in 1713 that 'the taste
of the ancients in their gardens' was for 'the amiable simplicity
of unadorned nature, that spreads over the mind a more noble sort
of tranquility'. Eighteen years later he devoted an epistle,
versified in heoric couplets, to the man who had become the
foremost English patron of Palladianism, Lord Burlington:
In you, my Lord, Taste sanctifies Expense,
For Splendour borrows all her Rays from Sense,
You show us, Rome was glorious, not profuse,
And pompous buildings once were things of use.
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Burlington's friend and protege, William
Kent, became the foremost Augustan garden designer. It would be
folly to attempt a better account of his achievement than Horace Walpole's:
At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms
of landscape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate,
and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the
twilight of imperfect essays. He leaped the fence, and saw that all
nature was a garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and
valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of
the gentle swell, or concave scoop, and remarked how loose groves
crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament, and while they called
in the distant view between their graceful stems, removed and
extended the perspective by delusive comparison.
Chiswick |
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Chiswick |
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Stowe |
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Stowe |
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Kent worked with Bridgeman on some estates and in succession to
Bridgeman on others. The historical records are very incomplete but
it is likely that when they worked together Kent provided the ideas
and Bridgeman the technical expertise. The best surviving examples
of their work are at Claremont, Chiswick House, Rousham and Stowe. The avenues in
these gardens remind us of the Forest style, and the delightful
lakes and glades are amongst the earliest examples of the
Serpentine style. Kent loved to give canals, basins and water
bodies a 'natural' shape. In Walpole's words, 'the gentle stream
was taught to serpentise seemingly at its pleasure'. However Kent's
interest was more in seeing landscape as pictures than as plans.
'The great principles on which he worked were perspective, and
light and shade', but as with the other landscape painters of his
time the landscape which really interested him was the landscape of
antiquity. The gardens designed by Kent and Bridgeman were redolent
of ancient times, replete with statuary, temples, grottos, and
hermit's caves.
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Rousham: the Praeneste, named after the home of a Roman
oracle. |
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Rousham: the Venus Vale |
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Rousham: the serpentine rill. |
At Chiswick House the statues in the exedra are
said to have come from Hadrian's Villa and to represent Caesar, Pompey
and Cicero. Another of Kent's
exedra, at Stowe, has niches for eight British Worthies.
Their derivative genius is shown allegorically by making them look
upwards to the Temple of Ancient Virtue set in the Elysian Fields.
The design of the temple was itself derived from the Temple of Vesta which overlooks the Tivoli
gorge outside Rome. At Rousham, Kent designed the Venus's Vale and
an arcade which was named the Praeneste after the Roman resort
where an oracle resided. At Claremont, Bridgeman designed a
Graeco-Roman amphitheatre made out of grass instead of stone and
not intended as a stage for bloody spectacles. He placed a circular
pond in front of the amphitheatre and Kent changed it into the
natural lake which occupies the centre of the valley today.
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The Temple of Ancient Virtue at Stowe was inspired by the
Temple of Vesta at Tivoli |
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This was the age when garden design was a 'nobleman's
recreation', and when many noblemen had a love of antiquity and
landscape painting which excelled that of the professional
designer. Lord Carlisle was the
leading figure in the creation of the park at Castle Howard, which Hussey calls 'the
masterpiece of.......the Heroic Age of English landcape
architecture'. In 1733 the anonymous poet who wrote that
'Carlisle's genius ....form'd this great design' compared
Wray Wood to an Italian scene:
This Wood with Justice Belvidere we name.
Statues at proper Views enrich the Scene,
Here chaste Diana and the
Paphian Queen,
Tho' Opposites in Fame, tho' Rivals made
Contented stand under one common Shade.
The Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard was inspired by
Palladio's Villa Capra which Colen
Campbell adapted at Mereworth and Lord Burlington at Chiswick.
Return to section heading
Charles Hamilton and Henry Hoare were
lesser noblemen who had been on the Grand Tour and acquired a
passion for the landscape of antiquity. At Painshill, Charles Hamilton
installed a Grecian statue of Bacchus in a temple, built a Roman
Bath House, and assembled a complete set of busts of the Roman
emperors.
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Stourhead - the finest example of an ideal landscape in
England |
Henry Hoare II, known in the family
as 'the Magnificent', returned from Italy in 1741 to take
possession of the Stourhead estate. He made the lake in 1744 and
surrounded it with a walk which was conceived as an allegory of
Aeneas' voyage after the fall of Troy. The grotto marks a stage in
his journey, and the Temple of Flora is inscribed with the caution
uttered by the Cumaean Sybil, in Virgil's Aeneid, before she led Aeneas
into the underworld to hear the prophecy of Rome's founding:
'Begone! you who are uninitiated, begone!'. Hoare also based his
design for the bridge on Palladio's five-arched bridge at Vicenza
and expressed the hope that the whole composition would resemble a
painting by Gaspar Poussin.
British patrons and designers sought to re-create the
'landscapes of antiquity'. Their visions of how this landscape
might have looked appeared were formed from reading Latin poetry,
from places visited on the Grand Tour and from the landscape
paintings of Claude, Poussin and others. William Kent met Lord
Burlington in the course of a Grand Tour and they later designed
Chiswick House. Charles Hamilton went to Italy after leaving Oxford
and later designed Painshill. Henry
Hoare was in Italy when he inherited Stourhead. All these men admired the Augustan
age and, in the course of making gardens which reflected this
taste, the predominant geometry of garden plans became increasingly
serpentine.
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