Andrew Jackson Downing and the Tyranny of Taste

Abstract

The following essay examines the published writing of Andrew Jackson Downing, the early nineteenth century architect and landscape gardener. As the most popular writer and commentator on house and landscape design of his time Downing profoundly shaped – both literally and metaphorically – the social and geographical environment of the emergent middle class. Relating his writing to the promotion of a shared nationalism as embodied in the landscape painting of the Hudson River School, the essay assesses Downing's drive to order by seeing it as a response to the general violence and disorder of the antebellum American city and demonstrates that the defining logic of Downing's project was the universalization of bourgeois taste, uniting the mutually legitimating discourses of privacy, consumption and self‐control.