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| A terrace design by Repton, at Burley-on-the-Hill in
Leicestershire. Repton supported the re-introduction of terraces to
English gardens. |
Repton's simple balustrades were sometimes adorned with urns and
can be described as 'Italianate', but he was far from designing
full-blown Italian gardens with flights of steps, statuary,
fountains, and terraces integrated round a central axis. Like all
eighteenth century garden designers Repton, Price,
and Knight were more interested in
the landscape of antiquity than in renaissance gardens. But the
three squires' proposal for a landscape transition led to a
full-blown Italian mode of the landscape
style.
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section
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Above: Loudon's drawing of a garden terrace at Isola
Bella
Below: Isola Bella |
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The first nineteenth century author to praise the style of
Italian and French renaissance gardens was J C Loudon. His admiration for what he called the
'ancient or geometrical style' was based on both observation and
theory. In 1813, at the age of 30, he sold his ferm ornee
for a magnificent profit and set off to tour Europe. His admiration
for the old formal gardens of Europe grew during a number of tours
between 1813 and 1819, and his opinion of English gardens was
correspondingly diminished. He admired Isola Bella. The first
edition of his monumental Encyclopaedia of Gardening was
published in 1822 and Loudon wrote that:
To say that landscape gardening is an improvement on geometric
gardening, is a similar misapplication of language, as to say that
a lawn is an improvement of a cornfield, because it is substituted
in its place. It is absurd, therefore, to despise the ancient
style...... It has beauties of a different kind, equally perfect in
their kind'. He added that English landscape gardening 'can seldom
succeed in producing anything higher than picturesque beauty.
Loudon drew support for his
unpatriotic views from the French Neoplatonic philosopher, Quatremere de Quincy, whose Essay on
The Nature, The End and the Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts
was published in 1823. Quatremere was an art-scholar, sculptor,
antiquarian and encyclopaediast who believed that artists should
imitate nature, and that 'nature' meant the Platonic world of ideas
and forms. Quatremere criticised English gardens for not making use
of the primary geometrical forms and for being more or less
indistinguishable from raw nature:
In fact, every element necessary to constitute imitation is
absent from . Even the idea of repetition is scarcely traceable.
What pretends to be an image of nature is nothing more nor less
than nature herself. The means of the art are reality. Everyone
knows that the merit of its works consists in obviating any
suspicion of art. To constitute a perfect garden, according to the
irregular system of landscape gardening, we must not have the least
suspicion that the grounds have been laid out by art.
Loudon fully agreed and wrote that 'forms perfectly regular, and
divisions completely uniform, immediately excite the belief of
design, and with this belief, all the admiration which follows the
employment of skill'.
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section
Loudon's conversion to the
Italian style is one of the great turning points in the history
of British garden design. He was the first theoretician to realise
that the century-long quest to imitate ever wilder versions of
'nature' had led into a dead end. When it was found that Irregular
gardens were indistinguishable from nature it became necessary to
turn back and to re-evaluate the traditional concern of the fine
arts with abstract shapes and forms. Loudon's ill-health persuaded
him to withdraw from the practice of landscape design but the
designers who reintroduced the Italian style to England during the
nineteenth century were all familiar with his work and his
writings.
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start of section
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| Above and below: William Atkinson's design for one of the
first nineteenth century Italian gardens, at Deepdene. |
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One of the first designers to make full use of Italian garden
ornament in England was the architect William Atkinson. He had done
some architectural work at Scone Palace in 1803 when Loudon was working
there on his Irregular layout for the estate. In 1825 Atkinson was
employed by Thomas Hope at Deepdene and Loudon praised his work as an
example of 'landscape
architecture' in the 1829 issue of the Gardener's
Magazine. Loudon's 1833 Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and
Villa Architecture gave further examples of 'landscape
architecture' and Loudon observed that in modern Italian villas
'The regularity of the garden is, as it were, an accompanying
decoration and support to the Architecture. The Architecture,
sculpture, and gardens of these villas are often designed by the
same hand, and concur in the general effect to produce perfect
harmony'.
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| Loudon praised Meason's book on The Landscape
Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy. Meason devised the
term 'landscape architecture' to mean that special type of
architecture which is found in landscape paintings. |
The term 'landscape architecture'
had been invented by G L Meason in
1828 to describe a style of building which could be found in
Italian landscape paintings. This was its first use in relation to
garden design. The garden at Deepdene had terraces at different
levels, balustrades, flights of steps, repeated urns, alcoves and
sculpture but no central axis. Hope had written an essay on gardens
in 1808 which reveals him as an enthusiastic supporter of the
Landscape Style. The Italian garden at Deepdene was the first stage
in a transition which ran through the park and over the lake to a
distant view of Box Hill.
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| The Italian terrace at Trentham Hall, designed by Charles
Barry. Above, in the late nineteenth century. Below, in the late
twentieth century. The house has been demolished.
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Most of the Italian gardens which were made in Victorian England
were conceived as the first stage in a transition. Charles Barry, who was
a contributor to Loudon's Architectural Magazine designed
his first Italian terrace at Trentham 1834, one year after the
publication of Loudon's encyclopaedia. Trentham appears to have set
a fashion for adding Italian terraces to Brownian parks and Barry
was comissioned to design similar terraces at Holkham, Cliveden and
Harewood. Barry also designed the
Italian terrace in Trafalgar Square.
W A Nesfield, who worked at
Trentham with Barry, was responsible for a number of Italian
terraces. Most of them have disappeared but the terrace in front of
the plant house at Kew gardens and the
parterre on the south side of Castle
Howard are well maintained. In 1848 Barry designed an Italian
garden at Shrubland
Hall in Norfolk which has a full axial layout. It was a
significant departure from the Landscape Style.
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| The Italian garden at Bowood, Wiltshire, was designed by
George Kennedy in the 1860s and added to the Brownian
Park. |
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Joseph Paxton was an enthusiast for the
Italian style and was the man who most completely adopted 'Loudon's
mantle'. He made his first lake at the age of 19 in the year which
saw the publication of Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Gardening.
It had a chapter on the 'Education of Gardeners' which contained
the following advice for young gardeners:
Suppose, for example, a man desires to be a king; that is a
desire sufficiently extraordinary; but if he will first make
himself acquainted with the history of men who have raised
themselves from nothing to be kings...... he may very likely attain
his object....... Let no young gardener, therefore who reads this,
even if he can but barely read, imagine that he may not become
eminent in any of the pursuits of life..... to desire and apply is
to attain, and the attainment will be in proportion to the
application.
Four years later Paxton was appointed head gardener to the Duke
of Devonshire at Chatsworth and Loudon
commenced publication of his Gardener's Magazine. The
Magazine contained voluminous advice on self-education for
gardeners and Paxton absorbed it all. He worked with Jeffry Wyatville on the Italian gardens at
Chatsworth, which divide the house from the Brownian park, and in
1831 he started a horticultural periodical to rival Loudon's.
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section
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| The Crystal Palace in South London. Above c1900. Below in
1985. |
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In 1850 he used Loudon's method of greenhouse construction to
build the Crystal Palace and in
the following year he set up a company which spent £1.2m on
moving the Crystal
Palace to Sydenham and installing it in a magnificent Italian
garden. This was as near as an apprentice gardener from a poor home
could get to becoming a king in Victorian England. The waterworks
at Sydenham were intended to outshine Versailles and wide terraces stepped down the
hill on both sides of a long central axis. However Paxton was not
able to resist the transition idea completely. He included an
irregular lake at the far end of the axis and one of the most
Sublime features in any British garden: a romantic island inhabited
by models of prehistoric monsters. Paxton also employed the Italian
style for the grounds at Mentmore and the People's Park in Halifax.
The style very popular in nineteenth century public parks. It is
shown in the drawing as an axial terraced garden which has been
added to an existing park.
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| Mentmore, c 1900 |
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