English landscape garden
These parks featured vast lawns, woods, and pieces of architecture, such as the classical mausoleum designed by Hawksmoor at Castle Howard.
These men had large country estates, were members of the anti-royalist Whig Party, had classical educations, were patrons of the arts, and had taken the Grand Tour to Italy, where they had seen the Roman ruins and Italian landscapes they reproduced in their gardens.
[6] Kent created one of the first true English landscape gardens at Chiswick House for Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington.
Bridgeman had built a series of garden features including a grotto of Venus on the slope along the River Cherwell, connected by straight alleys.
He placed eyecatchers, pieces of classical architecture, to decorate the landscape, and made use of the ha-ha, a concealed ditch that kept grazing animals out of the garden while giving an uninterrupted vista from within.
In the early 18th century, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, had commissioned Charles Bridgeman to design a formal garden, with architectural decorations by John Vanbrugh.
Kent remade the lake in a more natural shape, and created a new kind of garden, which took visitors on a tour of picturesque landscapes.
Brown's contribution was to simplify the garden by eliminating geometric structures, alleys, and parterres near the house and replacing them with rolling lawns and extensive views out to isolated groups of trees, making the landscape seem even larger.
The most important were: Humphry Repton (21 April 1752 – 24 March 1818) was the last great English landscape designer of the eighteenth century, often regarded as the successor to Capability Brown.
[15] Repton hit upon the idea of becoming a "landscape gardener" (a term he himself coined) after failing at various ventures and, sensing an opportunity after Brown's death, was ambitious to fill the gap and sent circulars round his contacts in the upper classes advertising his services.
To help clients visualize his designs, Repton produced 'Red Books' (so called for their binding)[16] with explanatory text and watercolors with a system of overlays to show 'before' and 'after' views.
[17] In 1794 Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price simultaneously published vicious attacks on the 'meagre genius of the bare and bald', criticizing Brown's smooth, serpentine curves as bland and unnatural and championing rugged and intricate designs, composed according to 'picturesque theory' that designed landscapes should be composed like landscape paintings, with a foreground, a middle ground and a background.
Repton re-introduced formal terraces, balustrades, trellis work and flower gardens around the house in a way that became common practice in the nineteenth century.
It really required steep slopes, even if not very high, along which paths could be made revealing dramatic views, by which contemporary viewers who had read Gothic novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) were very ready to be impressed.
In 1685, the English writer, formerly a diplomat at The Hague, Sir William Temple wrote an essay Upon the garden of Epicurus (published in 1690), including a passage which contrasted European symmetrical and formal gardens with asymmetrical compositions from China, for which he introduced (as Chinese) the term sharawadgi, in fact probably a mangled Japanese word for "irregularity".
The style became even more popular thanks to William Chambers (1723–1796), who lived in China from 1745 to 1747, and wrote a book, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils.
[31] One of the first English gardens on the continent was at Ermenonville, in France, built by marquis René Louis de Girardin from 1763 to 1776 and based on the ideals of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was buried within the park.
Even at Versailles, the home of the most classical of all French gardens, a small English landscape park with a Roman temple was built and a mock village, the Hameau de la Reine (1783–1789), was created for Marie Antoinette.
The central English Grounds of Wörlitz, in the Principality of Anhalt, was laid out between 1769 and 1773 by Leopold III, Duke of Anhalt-Dessau, based on the models of Claremont, Stourhead and Stowe Landscape Gardens.
In another part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth the Sofiyivka Park (Zofiówka), now Ukraine, was designed by Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki so as to illustrate the Odyssey and the Iliad.
The Monrepos Park is sited on the rocky island of Linnasaari in the Vyborg Bay and is noted for its glacially deposited boulders and granite rocks.
Such gardens usually lack the sweeping vistas of gently rolling ground and water, which in England tend to be set against a woodland background with clumps of trees and outlier groves.
