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| A 'terrifying alpine scene: the Devil's Bridge
on the St Gotthard Pass. As the eighteenth century progressed, the
emotions aroused by the passage of the Alps changed from fear to
excitement. |
A scene from Salvator Rosa as illustrated
in The English Landscape Garden. Frank Clark wrote that
'scandalous legends of lawlessness' became encrusted around the
artist. |
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Travellers were frightened by wild scenery at the beginning of
the eighteenth century. When passing through the Alps they would
shut their eyes or pull down the blinds in their coaches to hide
the jagged cliffs, the torrents, and the imminent prospect of being
catapulted over a precipice. By the century's end this fear had so
far diminished that a positive liking for 'Salvator Rosa and Sublimity' had taken its place.
Travellers sought for ever-wilder places and garden designers
responded to their new visual appetite. In the 1790s they invented
the Picturesque Style, and in the century which followed they made
'wild', 'rock', and 'woodland' gardens to accommodate plants,
notably rhododendrons, from far-flung lands and even from 'the
eaves of the world'.
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The taste for wild scenery was
partly a result of the Grand Tour through Northern Europe to Italy.
As the eighteenth century progressed the passage of the Alps
gradually changed from a genuinely terrifying experience to one
which induced awe and fear at the time but which could be recalled
at home with excitement and youthful pride at the dangers overcome.
The effects of Alpine scenery on the traveller were a special
interest of Frank Clark's:
For what in fact the gardeners were trying to do.... was to
recapture the emotions experienced during the Grand Tour when,
after leaving the sunny plains of France and Italy, they had
ascended the Alps to the very roof of Europe. Suspended between
earth and sky they had seen with fearful fascination the complex
pattern of the earth at their feet. Mountains, roaring cascades,
the evidences of the convulsive forces of nature in these vast
ranges, filled them with sensations of awe which they never
afterwards forgot. The painter who had best been able to translate
this experience into the idiom of paint was Salvator Rosa. Rosa, or Savage Rosa, as he was
called, round whose life scandalous legends of lawlessness had
become encrusted, the outlaw and friend of those banditti who had
threatened their safety in the mountains, became the romantic hero,
the pre-Byronic hero, of the age. His canvases, peopled with
hermits and banditti and filled with twisted trees, tumbled rocks,
cliffs, ruins and racing skies, enabled the traveller to
re-experience the delightful horror of such scenery and to
appreciate its significance when met with in poetry, the paintings
of other artists and in landscape. The correct associational link
was made by Walpole in a letter
during his tour with Gray in 1739:
'Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator
Rosa!'
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The taste for wild scenery at
home developed later. It was fostered by William Gilpin (1724-1804), the 'Master of
the Picturesque and Vicar of Boldre'. Gilpin's great series of
Picturesque Tours , published between 1782 and 1809,
awakened British tourists to the rugged delights of the River Wye,
North Wales and 'the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and
Westmoreland'. His descriptions of picturesque scenery were
followed by three essays which reached to the intellectual heart of
eighteenth century garden design theory: landscape painting and the
appreciation of nature. They were entitled Three Essays on
Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel and on Sketching
Landscape. Gilpin was highly critical of smoothness but
loved rough shaggy scenery - both in the wilds and in gardens:
But altho the picturesque traveller is seldom disappointed with
pure nature, however rude, yet we cannot deny, but he is
often offended with the productions of art....... He is frequently
disgusted also, when art aims more at beauty than she ought. How
flat, and insipid is often the garden scene, how puerile, and
absurd! the banks of the river how smooth, and parallel! the lawn,
and its boundaries, how unlike nature!
He also suggested that if a landscape painter wished to paint a
garden scene then he would have to:
Turn the lawn into a piece of broken ground: plant rugged oaks
instead of flowering shrubs: break the edges of the walk: give it
the rudeness of a road: mark it with wheel-tracks; and scatter
around a few stones, and brushwood; in a word, instead of making
the whole smooth, make it rough; and you make it also
picturesque.
Since Claude treated the
foregrounds of his paintings in this manner Gilpin took it that the
correctness of his taste was established beyond all reasonable
doubt.
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Sir Uvedale Price, was deeply impressed by Gilpin's
aesthetic ideas and wished to find a way of applying them to
gardens as well as to landscape painting. The title of Price's
first book on garden design was An essay on the Picturesque, as
compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and, on the use of
studying pictures, for the purpose of improving real landscape.
As the title implies, Price believed that the art of laying out
real landscape should be based on a study of paintings and natural
scenery. He echoed Gilpin's opinion that 'whoever views objects
with a painter's eye, looks with indifference, if not disgust, at
the clumps, the belts, the made water, and the eternal smoothness
and sameness of a finished place'. Price speculated that Lancelot
Brown would have thought the 'finest
composition of Claude..... comparatively rude and imperfect.....
though he probably might allow..... that it had "capabilities"'!
Price championed the idea of making wild romantic gardens. He
thought it impractical to make them sublime in Burke's sense of 'fitted.....to excite the
ideas of pain and danger', but entirely feasible to make them
picturesque in the sense of rough, varied, and intricate. He hated
'the tameness of the poor pinioned trees of a gentleman's
plantation', and detested artificial lanes with uniform curves,
regular gradients and neat grass verges. His love was for old
country lanes and bye roads in which the ground:
is as much varied in form, tint and light and shade as the
plants that grow upon it...... The winter torrents, in some places
wash down the mould from the upper grounds and form projections....
with the most luxurient vegetation; in other parts they tear the
banks into deep hollows, discovering the different strata of earth,
and the shaggy roots of trees.
Price even thought that 'the tracks of the wheels contribute to
the picturesque effect of the whole'. These were the effects which
Price wished to create in gardens. However he aknowledged
that:
Near the house picturesque beauty must, in many cases be
sacrificed to neatness..... It is not necessary to model a gravel
walk or drive after a sheep track or a cart rut, though very useful
hints may be taken from them both.
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| Downton Castle |
Price's friend and neighbour, Richard Payne Knight,
was a less cautious man - and extremely rich. At Downton Castle 'large
fragments of stone were irregularly thrown amongst briers and
weeds, to imitate the foreground of a picture'. According to
Repton this was an 'experiment' but J
C Loudon must have seen it some ten
years later and reported that fragments of rock were still
'scattered in front of Downton Castle..... quite unconnected with
each other'. In his maturity Knight decided that it was more
convenient to have a neat terrace in front of his castle. Downton
Vale is a very Gilpinesque place and one of the most romantic
'improved places' in England. The estate, and Knight's views on
terraces, will be further described in the next chapter.
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| Loudon's design for converting the lakeshore at Harewood
House from the Serpentine to the Irregular Style. The proposal was
not based on an accurate site survey but Loudon's design intentions
are very clear. |
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The young Loudon was an ardent admirer of Price, Knight
and total irregularity. He announced to the world in his first book
that :
I believe that I am the first who has set out as a landscape
gardener, professing to follow Mr Price's principles. How far I
shall succeed in executing my plans, and introducing more of the
picturesque into improved places, time alone must determine'.
Loudon was the son of a Scots farmer and had not been on a Grand
Tour when he arrived in London at the age of 20. However he did
have memories of the picturesque charm of the Water of Leith in
Edinburgh, and of a park outside Edinburgh which had been laid out
by a pupil of Lancelot Brown's. A tree belt hid the view of
Craigmillar Castle and Arthur's Seat, and the brook which ran through
the estate had, as Walter Scott later observed, been 'twisted into the links of a
string of pork-sausages'. Scott, the arch-romantic, was also an
admirer of Price and Knight. When judged by the principles of Price
and Knight, Loudon complained that Brown's style was 'productive of
the most tiresome monotony joined to the most disgusting
formality'.
Loudon's early work shows his interpretation of Price and
Knight's plea for the picturesque. His mentors drew no plans but
their admirer was a superb draughtsman. The sketches and plans
which he published in Country Residences show 'Mr Brown's
style' and 'the modern style' as practiced by himself(viz. figs ?
and ? in Chapter 1). It is plain that 'the modern style' is more
deserving of the description 'irregular' than any other style in
the history of British garden design. Loudon employed the
Picturesque Style for a large number of commissions in the first
decade of his professional life, and published designs for numerous
country residences, including Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, Harewood House in Yorkshire and Barnbarrow (now
Barnbarroch) in Wigtownshire. Next to
nothing survives of his work but on some estates, including the
grounds of Barnbarroch and parts of the lakeshore at Harewood,
nature has been allowed to take her course and has created some of
the effects which Loudon wished to attain by art.
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| Barnbarrow (Barnbarroch) in Loudon's drawing of
the house as it stood in 1806. It shows a Brownian scene with lawns
sweeping up to the house. |
Barnbarrow, in Loudon's design for converting
the house and garden to the Irregular Style. |
Barnbarrow in 1986. |
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The Picturesque Style had a
profound effect on planting design. It offered a theory about the
use of foreign plants in British gardens and provided a system of
compositional principles which could be used to harmonise exotic
and native plants. As will be discussed in the next chapter, this
developed into the Gardenesque
Style.
Book III of Knight's poem The Landscape has a versified
discussion of planting design. Knight
was enchanted by the romance of the English landscape:
O waft me hence to some neglected vale;
Where, shelter'd, I may court the western gale;
And, 'midst the gloom which native thickets shed,
Hide from the noontide beams by aching head!
For though in British woods no myrtles blow,....
No prowling tiger from the covert springs;
No scaly serpent, in vast volumes roll'd,
Darts on the unwary loiterer from his hold.
He liked to see plants growing in luxurient good health and with
no signs of regret for 'the comforts of a warmer sky'. This led him
to prefer 'trees which nature's hand has sown', or which had
adapted themselves to the British climate. His favourites trees
were the English stalwarts, oak and beech:
Let then of oak your general masses rise,
Wher'er the soil its nutriment supplies:
But if dry chalk and flints , or thirsty sand,
Compose the substance of your barren land,
Let the light beech its gay luxurience shew,
And o'er the hills its brilliant verdure strew.
Should time or fortune damage an ancient oak then Knight wished
to keep its gnarled remains as one would a ruined abbey:
If years unnumber'd, or the lightening's stroke
Have bared the summit of the lofty oak
(Such as, to decorate some savage waste,
Salvator's flying pencil often traced).
Entire and sacred let the ruin stand.
Despite his love for native plants, Knight wished to see exotic
plants in gardens - providing they were planted near the house or
near water and not in the midst of a natural wood:
The bright acacia, and the vivid plane,
The rich laburnum with its golden chain;
And all the variegated flowering race,
That deck the garden, and the shrubbery grace,
Should near to buildings, or to water grow,
Where bright reflections beam with equal glow,
And blending vivid tints with vivid light,
The whole in brilliant harmony unite.....
But better are these gaudy scenes display'd
From the high terrace or rich balustrade;
'Midst sculptured founts and vases, that diffuse,
In shapes fantastic, their concordant hues.
Knight 's exposition of the
principles for selecting and using plant species were complemented
by Price, 's ideas on how they should
be composed to produce a 'brilliant harmony' with 'concordant
hues'.
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| Rhododendrons - 'choice American plants' -
at Scotney Castle. Pruce was the first author to advocate the use
of exotic flowering shrubs outside the confines of the walled
garden. |
Price was the first author to write openly in favour of using
exotic flowering shrubs outside the narrow confines of the walled
garden. He said that if the improver seeks 'an infinite number of
pleasing and striking combinations' then he should 'avail himself
of some of those beautiful, but less common flowering and climbing
plants'. Plantings of furze, wild roses and woodbine might, he
suggests, be enlivened with 'Virginia Creeper, pericoloca, trailing
arbutus' and 'the choice American plants .......such as kalmias and
rhododendrons'. Price was much-read during the nineteenth century
and this remark appears to have been widely influential, especially
with regard to the planting of rhododendrons..
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Price was willing to allow flowering plants to be moved from
their traditional positions 'in borders or against walls' but he
insisted that they should be grouped to form painterly compositions. He believed that the eye of the
landscape painter with its understanding of nature and the
principles of composition was the best guide to good planting
design. The painters he most admired were Claude, Poussin and Rosa. This idea assumed great
importance during the nineteenth century and resulted in the
romantic woodland gardens which now grace so many of England's
stately homes. Scotney Castle in Kent is an outstanding
example. Christopher Hussey writes
that it was planted by his grandfather as a deliberate application
of the principles of Sir Uvedale Price.
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The Picturesque Style is also of theoretical interest
as an extreme application of the idea that art should imitate
nature. As can be seen from the diagram it made great use of jagged
irregular lines and represents the furthest possible remove from
geometrical regularity. In the second half of the nineteenth
century the Picturesque Style was used in the making of woodland
gardens. Owners of gardens on the western shores of the British
Isles acquired an enthusiasm for rhododendron woods arranged in
'painterly compositions'. Sir Joseph Hooker's Rhododendrons of the
Sikkim-Himalaya (1849-51) illustrated and popularised the
genus.
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| Birkenhead Park, designed by Paxton with Edward Kemp as
superintendent. |
A design by Edward Kemp for a quarry garden. The rough stone
adds to the ruggedness of the scene |
| One consequence of the desire for the
Picturesque was an enthusiasm for rock gardens. |
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| Rocks in the garden at Scotney Castle. |
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