Gentlemen and Players: Gardeners of the English Landscape

by TimMowl (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.28

  The English love affair with the landscape garden reached its height in the eighteenth century, when the creation of some of our greatest gardens set a stylistic lead which Continental Europe was eager to follow. In this informed and entertaining book, Timothy Mowl reveals how this development in garden style came about through an interaction between the garden owners, who had a vision of what these gardens might become, and the professionals who had the expertise to realise this vision. Technologies and discoveries were exchanged, and theories were absorbed, popularised and then discarded, in a fascinating sequence of action and reaction. It was a mould-breaking, revolutionary period in garden history. Mowl takes the reader on a fascinating journey to the magnificent gardens at Chiswick, Stowe, Castle Howard, Painshill, Stourhead and an astonishing host of lesser Edens, and casts a fresh and illuminating perspective on the great age of the English Arcadia (1620-1820).

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $4.21

  The English landscape garden of the 18th century was the one stylistic lead that continental Europe was eager to follow. Was it a natural evolution or a chain of absolute revolutions? This work reappraises the age of the English Arcadia, tracing garden style's development through the designers and their gardens - men including Vanbrugh, Repton, London and Wise, as well as lesser known but important contemporaries. The author suggests that the professionals were blinkered conformists, making money first and gardens second. In a highly competent way, Inigo Jones, Capability Brown and others were all negative reactionaries, tied to the politcal, social and economic forces of their time. The innovators, with the leisure and the detachment to dream, were the amateurs, all with gentry pretensions; John Evelyn, Lords Cobham and Burlington, Alexander Pope, William Shenstone and Richard Payne Knight. These were the mould-breakers, the horticultural Jacobins of the gardens. The two dreams that lured them on to experiment should have been incompatible, but in the event worked together. One was a lost, mythical perfection of classical Greece - the scholar's Gardens of Epicurus; the other was the Puritan's vision of Romantic Nature - the real Paradise Lost, a raw beauty of wild hills and woodland waters. A key feature of the book is its garden tours for the designer or group of designers covered in each chapter. In addition to its use for students of history of art and architecture, garden and cultural history, the book should act as a companion for visitors to historic gardens.