The English Landscape Garden in the Eighteenth Century: The Cultural Importance of an English Institution

Abstract

Art historians and cultural historians have noted what appears to be a puzzle in eighteenth-century history, a puzzle which emerges from an apparent conflict of the following trend: as English country houses became more and more classical, the gardens around them became less so. That is, as architecture progressively conformed to the principles of universal order and mathematical geometry embodied in the Palladian ideal, gardens seemed to repudiate those same principles, embracing irregularity and particularity. Another apparently contradictory trend is noteworthy: as country houses became smaller through the eighteenth century, the gardens around them became larger. By the later eighteenth century people of means seem to have preferred smallish houses in acres of parkland, rather than enormous houses in small, formal gardens.There are two possible ways of approaching this problem. The first is simply to ignore the contradiction and accept the houses and gardens as products of separate traditions. Most art historians have done this, fitting the houses and gardens respectively into the classical and romantic traditions. The houses are said to be classical in style because they were intended to appeal to the reasoning faculties of the Enlightenment mind, while the gardens are called romantic because they were designed to appeal principally to the subjective and non-rational faculties, the senses and the emotions. The puzzle of classical houses in romantic gardens simply does not arise when an author such as Hussey, for example, examines the history of gardens, or when Summerson writes about the classical country house.