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7 - The London Pleasure Gardens
- Michael Symes
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Summary
That ephemeral and elusive phenomenon of leisure life in London, the Pleasure Garden, shone most brightly in the 18th century. It was not confined to London, and even the names of the London gardens were to be encountered in those provincial cities that adopted the fashion; but the principal London models furnish the greatest number of illustrations, Vauxhall above all. The pleasure gardens can be distinguished from private gardens or public parks since they were run as commercial enterprises which charged for admission. They constituted the principal loci for organised leisure or pleasure al fresco, and Warwick Wroth in his still definitive account of the subject (1896) listed 64, though many were small and no more than pub or spa gardens where bowls or skittles might be played. The pleasure gardens were formal in layout, in order to make optimum use of the confined space, but that does not mean that the new gardening was ignored. Far from it: several elements of the landscape garden were incorporated, particularly trompe l’oeil illusion and theatrical effects.
The purposes of the pleasure garden were to see and be seen; to mix socially; to have assignations; to eat and drink; to listen to music both played and sung; to stroll and inspect the various garden features; to dance; and to enjoy a summer evening, on the disappointingly few occasions when the weather was benign. The season usually ran from May to September, though it varied, and some of the gardens were open during the day. As time went on, further popular entertainments were added – fireworks, balls, exhibitions, juggling, tight-rope walking. Above all, pleasure gardens were about people, as the plentiful images testify, and in some ways this is the antithesis of the landscape garden, which could often be enjoyed in solitude and contemplation. The proprietors took advantage of the crowds by using prints as marketing tools: at Vauxhall, for instance, they were sold in the walks.
The pleasure gardens varied in reputation and respectability. It is still a moot question as to the social range of attendees: the entrance fee of one shilling at Vauxhall, a tenth of a labourer's average weekly wage, would deter all but the well off, but employers would bring their servants in; and those who stood to gain financially from the evening out – pickpockets and prostitutes – would find no difficulty in gaining access.
8 - Nuneham Courtenay
- Michael Symes
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Nuneham Courtenay, some five miles south-east of Oxford, was and still is an exceptional garden because of its several facets. The two principal features are the flower garden and ‘Capability’ Brown's landscaping, but there are echoes of other gardens together with an all-important cultural context that is unique. The river Thames was a principal attraction in the landscape. The owner was the 1st Earl Harcourt, who inherited the seat at Stanton Harcourt, also in Oxfordshire, on low-lying land without much of an external view. This estate had a particular resonance because Alexander Pope had translated the fifth book of the Iliad, which earned him a fortune, in the tower in 17181 (Fig 8.1), but by 1755 the house was becoming dilapidated, and the earl decided to move to Nuneham (originally Newnham) and build what his wife, somewhat in dismay, dubbed a villa rather than a seat. Villas, as conceived by Palladio, had found ample expression at Chiswick and Marble Hill plus Pope's own villa on the Twickenham stretch of the Thames, and perhaps Pope's association with Stanton Harcourt had suggested the idea of a villa to the earl, sited this time on a significant hill above the river. There were extensive views from the house and a magical view of it from the river, as many prints and other depictions attest.
It is particularly from prints that we can chart the progress of changes and developments in the grounds and gauge the cultural approach and associations. The late Mavis Batey made a special study of the site, based on the Harcourt papers in the Bodleian Library, and I am indebted to her work. There is a clear distinction between the approach of the 1st Earl (1714–77) and his son Viscount Nuneham (1736–1809) who succeeded to the title of 2nd Earl Harcourt on his father's death. Both were forward-thinking about landscaping, but it was the 2nd Earl rather than his father who brought radical new ideas to garden design and was responsive to general movements such as the Picturesque.
6 - Chiswick
- Michael Symes
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There are real problems in considering Chiswick as a landscape garden. It was undoubtedly famed and regarded as a formative influence, but when proclaimed as the cradle of the new gardening there should be pause for thought. William Kent certainly introduced a few naturalistic touches, and there were numerous wiggling paths in the best artinatural tradition, but overwhelmingly, then and now, the stand-out, memorable features were and are the formal ones – the exedra, the pattern of goose-foot allées, the Pantheon-like temple in the orange-tree garden, plus the conservatory and the Italian garden (early 19th century). Lord Burlington (1694–1753) was the champion of Palladio, the Italian architect who embraced both classical and Renaissance designs of his own though based on classical forms, and inspired a whole generation of ‘English Palladians’ – but this was to do with architecture. There was therefore a dichotomy between architecture and native garden developments. Lord Burlington, up to the late 1720s, concentrated on creating a quasi-classical garden to complement his iconic villa, based on Palladio though far from being an exact copy. By 1733 there were those who thought that Kent was steering Chiswick in the direction of the new style, but, at the same time as his minor efforts at naturalising, the formal elements continued to be formal. When Burlington died in 1753, Chiswick already seemed old fashioned to some. And by and large it is the geometry that prevails in prints.
This heavily formal garden, partly classical and partly Italian Renaissance in feeling, is represented in the first half of the century by two sets of illustrations, by Pieter Rysbrack (oil paintings, c.1729) and Jacques Rigaud (pen and wash, 1733). Four of the paintings were engraved by Claude Du Bosc and published by Rysbrack in 1734: two are illustrated in Figs 6.1 and 6.2. prepared print studies of all four for Du Bosc, now lost, and that these studies reflected changes in the five years since the original paintings. Kent himself sketched numerous features in the period 1730–35, but it is not always clear whether these were proposals or records of what was already there.
Frontmatter
- Michael Symes
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Contents
- Michael Symes
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10 - Luke Sullivan, François Vivares, Anthony Walker
- Michael Symes
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If Woollett reigned supreme among engravers, Luke Sullivan and François Vivares were not far behind in their series of large garden prints, to be followed in turn by Anthony Walker, who also produced quality work.
Luke Sullivan
Sullivan's landscape engravings have been covered in an article by the author in 1984, but here the emphases will be different. To start with some biographical details: there seem to be conflicting accounts of his early life, but general agreement that he lived an erratic life on the wrong side of the tracks, spending most of his time in taverns and brothels. The French author Basan claimed that he was born in Troyes in France in 1698, but that appears to be wishful thinking, since Sullivan (a not uncommon Irish name) was born in 1705 in County Louth. At an early age he moved with his family to Badminton, where his father was one of the grooms of the Duke of Beaufort, and the young Sullivan worked in the stables there. He showed a natural talent for drawing, and was exposed at Badminton to one of the most vast and most overwhelming landscapes imaginable. Under the duke's patronage he was apprenticed to a master engraver, but there is some mystery surrounding his identity. Some authorities maintain that he was Thomas Major, but since Sullivan was considerably older than Major this is unlikely. On the other hand, he may have concentrated on drawing in younger years and taken up engraving in his maturity. T Dodd, in his Memoirs of British Engravers (manuscript), considered that Sullivan worked in the style of Jacques Le Bas of Paris, but admitted there was no evidence to link them as master and apprentice.
Unlike Woollett, who was producing plates at 17, Sullivan was in his forties when he came up with his earliest known work, a view of the Battle of Culloden (1746) after a painting by Augustin Heckel. Hogarth took him on as assistant, but Sullivan's dissipated lifestyle rendered him unreliable and he would disappear for weeks at a time. A favourite hostelry was The Feathers in Leicester Square, where he would meet many fellow artists. Nollekens, trying to present him in a favourable light, described him as ‘a handsome lively fellow’.
13 - Sets of seats
- Michael Symes
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In addition to the topographical guides covered in Chapter 12, there were a number of publications that concentrated on houses and gardens, with small images usually facing a page of descriptive text. The three principal sets were William Watts's Seats of the Nobility and Gentry (1779), William Angus's The Seats of the Nobility and Gentry in Great Britain and Wales (1787), and Picturesque Views of the Principal Seats of the Nobility and Gentry in England and Wales by Harrison & Co (1786). The prints were sold individually as well as in bound sets, and have differing dates of publication, so the dates above are ‘from’. To these can be added the collections by Paul Sandby from 1774 to 1781, which embraced urban sights, natural scenery, bridges and old buildings as well as houses and gardens. The fact that all these publications are clustered in the decades 1770–90 and just beyond points to competition and rivalry, but above all to the rise of tourism and the progressively ‘picturesque’ way of portraying and seeing.
The issuing of prints individually was clearly driven by commercial considerations. It might help the consumer to be able to purchase a single print if more were not required, but overall more prints would be sold as a result.
William Watts
Watts (1752–1851), who nearly reached his century, was a pupil of Paul Sandby and Edward Rooker and took over publishing The Copper Plate Magazine after Rooker's death. His masterpiece was the Seats, but he also subsequently engraved sets of views of Bath, London and, after extensive travels abroad, Turkey and Palestine, retiring in 1805 although he had 46 more years to live. His sympathies were with the French Revolution: he went to Paris and lost a considerable sum through becoming financially involved. The Seats, however, betrays no such feelings and is as respectful (not to say sycophantic) to the nobility as could be. Doubtless he knew on which side his bread was buttered, and he had a living to make.
The collection of seats by Watts brings together the work of a number of artists including such prominent names as Richard Wilson, William Tomkins, Paul and Thomas Sandby, Arthur Devis, JC Nattes, Michael Angelo Rooker, Thomas Hearne, George Barret, William Hodges and Humphry Repton.
Preface
- Michael Symes
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A great deal about the English Landscape Garden can be revealed and read in contemporary prints. As visual records, prints chart the progress and development of garden design, but, perhaps more importantly, they also indicate how gardens were perceived at the time and how owners or artists wanted them to look. There is a wealth of material deserving of consideration by anyone interested in garden history.
While the designed landscape grew in richness and complexity, the techniques of printmaking developed to rise to a higher standard of reproducing garden scenes. This resulted, particularly in the mid-18th century, in many images that are exceedingly attractive in their own right as pictures. Garden prints can, at their best, be highly atmospheric and give great aesthetic pleasure. And even where the visual quality is not so pronounced a print can still have much to tell.
It may well be asked, why focus entirely on prints – should not paintings and sketches be considered? There are two main answers. One is that paintings have been covered comprehensively in John Harris's The Artist and the Country House (1979) and Roy Strong's The Artist and the Garden (2000). The other, more telling, reason is that prints ensured wide circulation of an image and were publicly available. Just like books (of which they were often a part), prints would be an important element in mass communication, thereby contributing to discussion and spreading taste. The question of whether a print merely reflects fashion or helps to create it has mixed answers. While on one hand prints illustrate a narrative of the evolution of the landscape garden, they can also act as drivers of that narrative. Prints of the same scene at different periods often indicate changes in both style and taste.
The aims of this book are to show the range of depiction of gardens in the mid- to late 18th century, to ‘read’ the garden from prints, and to try to determine what they reveal or tell us about attitudes to the landscape garden. It does not attempt to be exhaustive in the reproduction of images: there are countless thousands of prints, especially small ones, including those where (as often happened) the house was the focal point and the surroundings were only of secondary interest.
Notes
- Michael Symes
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Index
- Michael Symes
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Selected Reading
- Michael Symes
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4 - Royal landscapes
- Michael Symes
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In the 17th century it was the royal and court gardens that set the trends and dictated taste. The determining factor was French influence, Charles II having spent his exile there. The most magnificent garden of the time was Hampton Court, its canal being originally the longest stretch of garden water. At the same time, however, there were extensive avenue gardens being laid out, as at Badminton, which stretched into three counties. But, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the rise of the Protestant succession ensured a gradual weakening of the power of French (Catholic) taste, and this was combined with the supremacy of Parliament which diminished the authority of the monarch. Translated into garden terms, this meant that the aristocrats who ran the country through Parliament, mainly the Whigs in the 18th century, began to create the grandest gardens in the country, eclipsing those of the monarch.
While gardens were still largely formal, the royal estates, especially those that were open to the public, like Kensington Gardens, continued to hold importance even though they were now being challenged by such creations as Stowe and Wanstead (the ‘English Versailles’). They were depicted in prints and were well known and admired. But although the royal gardens tended to uphold tradition – especially Hampton Court – the early stirrings of the landscape movement can be detected in two of the sites, Richmond Gardens and Kensington Gardens. It is likely that Queen Caroline, wife of George II, was responsible for both initiatives, though working through the designers Bridgeman and Kent. Later gardens, especially Virginia Water and the second phase of Kew, show the full flowering of the landscape garden.
Richmond Gardens
Richmond Gardens, comprising the riverside strip of present-day Kew, were at the time separate, and not amalgamated with Kew until 1802. It was the property of the monarch, as opposed to Kew, which was in the care of the Prince of Wales, and, later, his widow Augusta. The two gardens could hardly have contrasted more.
In the case of Richmond, the layout by Bridgeman was formal but asymmetrical, and some irregular curves can be seen in the network of paths.
12 - The gazetteers
- Michael Symes
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Once it had been established how powerful a medium the print was, and how potentially commercial, it was inevitable that topographical guides would proliferate, to encourage sightseeing and of course to increase profits for the publishers and booksellers. Individual and local guidebooks would serve a focused purpose, but a phenomenon that arose in the second half of the century was the gazetteer, a publication which set out to cover the whole country or large parts of it by providing text and illustrations (prints) to describe features of special historical, architectural or cultural interest. The rise of the gazetteer can also be linked to improvements in travel (road conditions and better suspension in horse-drawn carriages), the spread of tourism and visiting, and the increase in interest in the Picturesque, scenes that were particularly wild or dramatic.
The idea of a countrywide guide was not new in itself. Knyff and Kip's Britannia Illustrata had spread its net wide to illustrate seats of the aristocracy and gentry in 1707, with a second volume in 1715, while the Buck brothers ambitiously attempted to depict all the ‘Views of the most remarkable Ruins of Abbeys and Castles now remaining’ from 1727 to 1742. But it took a change in taste, from the antiquarian focus of the Bucks to the landscape garden and towards the Picturesque, to propel the publications considered in this chapter.
The first of the gazetteers, for our purposes, was one which did no more than dip its toes in the water. England Illustrated, two volumes, 1764, was published by the brothers Dodsley, and only, in effect, presents territory covered by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck 30 years before. In other words, it concentrates on antiquities. Gardens are mentioned minimally, the exception being Chatsworth, where the cypress grove, statuary, the tree of copper (though some say it was of other materials) and the baroque cascade feature. A few gardens are shown peripherally where houses are engraved, but the surprise is a view of the canal at Gubbins, Hertfordshire, after Chatelain (for original, see Fig 5.17), which bears no relation to the text. The illustration of Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, on its mount, gives something of the plantings. All engravings in the book are by Joseph Ryland after B Ralph, if sometimes owing something to earlier sources, but without anything relevant in Volume 2.
2 - Printomania
- Michael Symes
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Summary
There is no question that the rapid rise in production of prints in the 18th century increased interest in gardens and that owners saw this expanding medium as a means of publicising their properties, and that they and their designers used it as an opportunity to spread taste and fashion. What follows in this chapter is a consideration of aspects of printmaking and what kind of prints appeared in the early days.
Techniques
Prints in general fall under several different heads, but as far as topographical and garden prints are concerned, there are four principal processes that one is likely to encounter in the 18th century.
Copper engraving
Basically, lines are scored on a copper plate using a burin or graver. The drawing to be copied is laid out below a diagonal mirror so that the engraver sees a reverse image of it. It is this reverse picture that has to be incised, since the process of reproduction will turn it back to the original form. A drawing is made on the plate and the burin is guided along the lines. Depths of surface and different textures could be achieved by a skilful engraver. A copper plate might yield up to a thousand or more copies, but it would become worn and would sometimes need to be reworked. If alterations were needed, they would be freshly engraved on an existing plate. The harder-wearing steel was introduced in 1821 and largely superseded copper.
Etching
As with engraving, a copper plate is employed. It is covered with wax and the image is drawn in it with an etching needle. The plate is placed in an acid bath, which leaves the wax unaffected while the acid bites into the scored lines, and according to the length of time for which the plate is exposed, the lines will appear lighter or deeper. The process is known as ‘biting’ or ‘biting in’. To ensure variations in the depth of lines, a number of immersions might be required, with varnish protecting lines already satisfactorily formed. It was a much less physically taxing process than engraving.
1 - Image and propaganda
- Michael Symes
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It would be impossible to study the English Landscape Garden of the 18th century fully without recourse to the wealth of evidence provided in the form of prints. Although there was no shortage of written accounts to describe gardens at the time, prints were the most forceful way of recording and communicating to a wide audience what a garden looked like, which meant they were accepted as an important medium; but it also gave power to the creators of the print, which might on occasion be some distance from reality. Prints, indeed, tell us as much about the agendas of the garden owner and artist as they do about the gardens being depicted. Reality can suffer in the process, being adjusted or massaged for particular purposes. And those purposes would include ‘spin’, the presentation of an image in what was deemed to be a desirable form, and propaganda.
The sharpness of line encountered in prints may lead to the assumption that they are reliably representational, but that is far from the case. They were the widespread means of recording visually before the advent of photography, but they must not be mistaken for photographs.
Perusal of prints is important in order to understand the thoughts, feelings and concerns of the day as well as to survey the types of garden being made or maintained. They show how gardens were perceived and understood at the time – which may not necessarily be how they have been perceived subsequently. As the whole idea was to sell the maximum number of prints, it was clearly incumbent on the artist to purvey an image that was in tune with the times. Sometimes this would be a matter of portraying (more or less accurately) what was already there, in other words reflecting existing taste, but in other cases features – usually buildings – might be depicted that had not actually been constructed and never would be. And if the garden was an innovative one, as frequently happened in the mid- to later 18th century, it would also be a way of spreading new taste or fashion.
3 - Pattern books
- Michael Symes
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Gardening manuals that gave instruction had existed since the 16th century, but the use of template illustrations gathered pace as the spread of prints grew. There was a division between gardens and architecture, and the latter often concentrated on garden features as relatively cheap and simple to construct from drawings. The first book for our purposes, which was of trans-European importance, was Andrea Palladio's I Quattri Libri dell’Architettura, published in Venice in 1570. The book covers the orders of architecture, houses, streets, bridges, piazzas, basilicas, Roman temples and the internal features of a building. Examples given include both actual Roman buildings and Palladio's designs based on the classical. Palladianism swept Britain in the early 18th century, the Augustan age, and although this primarily affected the style of houses, nonetheless some garden buildings and a significant number of bridges owe their origin to Palladio's opus. All four books were first translated into English by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni in 1715, who himself designed houses and garden buildings in England. The translation ran through two further editions, though Isaac Ware's closer translation and more accurate reproduction of Palladio's original plates in The Four Books of Architecture (1738) is accepted as the more definitive today. The list of subscribers includes the important cultural figures, patrons and practitioners of the day, such as Lord Burlington.
One of the bridges (Fig 3.1) is illustrated in Plate 3 of the Third Book and served as the model for the bridge at Painshill (see Fig 9.10): Charles Hamilton was a subscriber to the Ware edition. Other bridges, usually a single curved span of wood, had a criss-cross design that led to its being frequently and mistakenly described as Chinese. Stone bridges in the book (for example Fig 3.2) were imitated at Stourhead and elsewhere. Henry Hoare, owner of Stourhead, claimed that he took the design from Palladio's design for a bridge at Vicenza, but the two there have only three arches. Henry Flitcroft's five-arch design is actually a composite of Plate 7 (Fig 3.2, at Rimini) and Plate 12.
15 - A miscellany of prints
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The most evocative, detailed and informative prints are of course the large ones, so often issued in series, as we have seen. But there was a whole industry of small, cheap prints, which, while mostly lacking in precision and detail, may well supplement the larger ones and fill in gaps. Some important gardens, indeed, are recorded only in small prints. A range of publications carried such prints: magazines or books, with images sometimes sold separately. The problem today is that so many small prints were cut out from their original publications that it may be difficult to identify the source or date. Even if the caption survives, and it well may not, the publication can remain unknown, along with the identity of the artist or engraver, anonymity being the normal case.
A number of smaller prints have already been illustrated in previous chapters. Sometimes they are based on large originals, and sometimes they are just to give a general, rather vague impression. But rarely were the finest engravers involved: the quality of the prints leads to the inescapable conclusion that economy was all. Cheap to produce meant engaging lesser lights in the engraving profession, and the need to provide images quickly would rule out the painstaking practices of the great printmakers.
This chapter enables readers to make comparison between the quality of large, medium and small prints. Small does not always mean vague or generalised, and sharpness of detail is possible (vide the sets by Watts and Angus covered in Chapter 13). However, large prints have a distinct advantage when it comes to architectural detail or plantings: so often are trees depicted generically rather than portraying individual species in smaller prints.
Large prints
Most large prints have been covered in previous chapters, particularly with relation to Woollett, Sullivan, Vivares and Anthony Walker. There were a few others, however, that deserve mention. There is a pair by Joseph Wood, possibly a pupil of Chatelain and known for his landscape work, after John Harris the Younger, of Warfield, Berkshire, which is a site seldom mentioned by garden historians (Figs 15.1 and 15.2). The views are largely as seen today and indicate large-scale landscaping with some formality (lines of trees) combined with dense woodland, bare banks in Brownian style and a few follies, all at a transitional time (1753).
5 - Stowe
- Michael Symes
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The most famous garden in Britain in the 18th century was Stowe, near Buckingham. It was frequently visited and more talked and written about than any other, and also more often depicted than gardens elsewhere. One can read the development of the layout from a few paintings and sketches and a large number of visitor accounts in prose and verse, but to understand the appearance of the gardens and what they express, together with how they were perceived and how tastes changed, one needs to consult the substantial body of prints that covered the span of Stowe's glory days. Not only did prints do most to spread the fame of the gardens and information about them in such forms as the successive (and pioneering) series of guidebooks, but they led to Stowe being considered the peak of the landscape garden on the Continent. Georges Le Rouge, mentioned in Chapter 3, presented some prints of Stowe in his cahiers, printed as usual in reverse, in a desperate attempt to ‘prove’ that it was Chinese in flavour. As for Catherine the Great, when she ordered the celebrated ‘Green Frog’ dinner service from Wedgwood, there were 48 views of Stowe illustrated, nearly twice the number of its nearest rival, Kew. Most were taken from prints by George Bickham Jr after artwork by Chatelain, representing the gardens in 1752. The Green Frog images would have been supplemented by accounts from the Neyelovs, father and son, architects who came to England in 1771. They would have reported back to Catherine, clutching one or more Stowe guidebooks which portrayed a wide range of buildings and other features, several of which inspired the empress to stamp her own mark on them and ‘Russianise’ the structures.
But the huge fame and popularity of Stowe abroad create a problem if we wish to consider it as the premier landscape garden. It was structured and laid out in the early part of the century along formal, baroque lines: perhaps one should call it an Augustan garden, since the references were mainly classical, albeit with some Renaissance and modern features to add variety. The simple, restricted layout of three terraces near the house c.17002 gave way to a grand French formality and thence to an enormous landscaped park that contained the famous gardens.
11 - Horace Walpole
- Michael Symes
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Summary
Horace Walpole (1717–97) was the supreme dilettante and witty social commentator of the century. An ‘arbiter of taste’ and connoisseur of the arts, he played a large part in changing fashion and taste, and was proud of influencing others to follow his lead. For instance, he gloried in getting his friend ‘Dickie’ Bateman of Old Windsor to convert his gardens, filled with chinoiserie in the 1730s and 1740s, to a showcase for Gothic architecture: ‘I preached so effectually that his every pagoda took the veil’. And it is no exaggeration to claim that he transformed Twickenham after his arrival in 1747, and his subsequent development of Strawberry Hill from what was known as a classical village to something more ‘Gothick’ in flavour. In making him the subject of this chapter it is as a patron and one who determined how prints should appear, for he was not himself an engraver.
Comparison may be drawn between Walpole and two figures already encountered, Lord Burlington at Chiswick and Lord Cobham at Stowe. In terms of land ownership he held no equivalent to the vast estates of Burlington (including massive holdings in Yorkshire) and Cobham, but as a cultural influence Walpole could aspire to be in their league. He was to a much smaller extent a patron, and relied on artists to present an image of Strawberry Hill and its gardens that he firmly directed. Nor was his philosophy of garden design confined to Strawberry Hill: his advice extended to a number of other properties, especially within the Twickenham area.
Walpole visited and commented on a large number of gardens, but in this sphere he is best known for The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (published 1780, although ready a decade before). This is the most read and quoted discursive text of the time, although in detail and coverage it had to yield to Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), which does not, however, look at history. Readers of Walpole's essay should be aware of its bias, the ‘Whig view of garden history’ as it has become known, in which the landscape garden is seen as an upward and ever more naturalistic progress from William Kent to the grand climax of ‘Capability’ Brown, even though Walpole tempers that by declaring that an owner with vision and taste is the best designer of his own property.
9 - William Woollett
- Michael Symes
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- Book:
- Prints and the Landscape Garden
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 10 January 2024, pp 122-134
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
The outstanding engraver of gardens was William Woollett (1735–85), whose arrival on the scene coincided with the full flowering of the pictorial landscape garden. He often combined etching and engraving, with immensely subtle depiction of trees and foliage and an ability to make objects in the foreground stand out. Born in Maidstone in August 1735, William, the son of Philip Woollett, a flax-dresser, had little education and did not travel in his youth. His father had to give up working with flax because of asthma, and turned to renting an inn called the Turk's Head. William's schoolmaster, Simon Goodwin, noticed his graphic talents, including when Woollett drew on a slate the head of a schoolfellow named Buttershaw, who had a prominent nose. Goodwin glimpsed the drawing, asked Woollett to finish it, and then kept it. He also drew his father's acquaintances.
A Mr Poole of Maidstone reported that when Woollett was a boy he had a mouse on a chain that was ‘so delicately formed that the mouse scarcely felt its confinement’. Having witnessed this, a stranger from London visiting the Turk's Head commended the boy's ingenuity, whereupon the proud father informed him that William also had a talent for drawing. This stranger is probably identifiable with the merchant who is said to have shown a drawing of Woollett's to John Tinney. It has even been suggested that the stranger was Tinney himself.
After winning a share of a lottery prize, Philip Woollett could now afford to apprentice William to Tinney, who in due course became better known as Woollett's master than as an engraver himself. The young Woollett learned fast, and his first engraving on copper was a portrait of the father of a silversmith at Maidstone. He may have had to struggle with weak eyes, however: William Alexander claimed that Woollett was so near-sighted that he worked with an optical glass in his hand and could hardly distinguish a cow from a horse. Whether this was the case or not, it does not seem to have hindered the progress and career of the precocious engraver, who was producing admirable plates before he was 18.