Review: Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design

Abstract

Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design . The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. 21 May–5 September 2010 Frederick Law Olmsted's monumental Greensward Plan of Central Park, dated 1858, was featured in the second gallery of the recent Romantic Gardens exhibition at the Morgan Library (Figure 1). The assembly there of a significant and sumptuous array of prints, drawings, manuscripts, treatises, maps, and recent color photographs reveals that America's most celebrated backyard has deep stylistic affinities with earlier European landscape gardens, from the private estates of eighteenth-century England to the parks and gardens of France and Germany. This concept is not new to landscape historians; however, most visitors will come away with a new understanding of Central Park. Figure 1 Romantic Gardens , showing Olmsted's Greensward plan (Morgan Library & Museum) It is largely owing to the energy of Betsy Barlow Rogers, an eminent landscape preservationist, historian, and founder in 1980 of the Central Park Conservancy, that the park has been restored and has regained its position on par with its distinguished peers. Rogers, the chief curator of this exhibition, together with collaborators Elizabeth Eustis and John Bidwell, has drawn heavily from materials in the Morgan and also from her extensive personal collection. Organized chronologically and geographically, the exhibition traces stylistic developments in the landscape gardens of England, France, Germany, and America during the eighteenth and nineteenth …