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Chapter Four: British
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British 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 220 8/10/10 1:44:58 PM 221 O Facing page: Lanning Roper, Herb garden, Scotney Castle, Kent. The Painted Garden: William Kent’s Rousham On a gentle slope rising above the winding river Cherwell near Steeple Aston , in Oxfordshire, England, a woodland path at the edge of a close-cropped bowling green, north of a Jacobean stone house, runs into a small park. The path widens through a series of sun-dappled glades ornamented with urns and statuary green with lichen and the patina of time, past arcades and small classical temples, cascades of water spilling over stone grottoes. A serpentine rill—a stream in a stone bed—follows the curving line of a gravel path and empties into a clear, dark octagonal pool hidden in the midst of the woods. The long view extends upriver to a medieval bridge, then across the meadow on the opposite bank to a Gothic ruin and beyond to a rustic stone arch on a distant hill. Walking along the path and coming upon the surprise views in the soft early-morning English air, one understands the beauty and mystery of great parks everywhere. Rousham Park, as landscape historian Christopher Hussey wrote in 1946, is a “unique document of garden art; the earliest surviving ancestor of all the landscape gardens and parks in the world.” Last year marked the tercentenary of the birth of the man who created it, William Kent, whose innovative style not only set a pattern for the great private parks of England (some of them later landscaped by “Capability” Brown, who notably became head gardener at Stowe) but was the forerunner of many of our most cherished nineteenth-century urban American parks. Of the several eighteenth-century parks Kent designed, Rousham is the only one that survives unchanged—and in the same family—since its completion in 1741. 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 221 8/10/10 1:44:58 PM [44.213.99.37] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:28 GMT) c h a p t e r f o u r 222 In the second decade of the eighteenth century, whenever the literati of London dined together, by the time the port was served the fashionable gossip was likely to have been dismissed for more serious topics—among them the principles of gardening. Such eminent writers as Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison talked and wrote passionately on the subject of gardens. Seeking to abolish the French tyranny of geometric formality in gardens like Versailles, and the labored artifice of the ever more outrageous shapes of topiary admired by the Dutch, they penned essays with wit and vehemence in favor of what was to become the quintessential English style: the natural, or picturesque, landscape—a landscape born of the neoclassical taste of the Augustan poets and essayists, who encouraged notions of an easy naturalness, of grace and civility as opposed to stateliness and pomposity. “Our British gardeners . . . instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible,” wrote a disapproving Addison in the Spectator in 1712. And in An Essay on Criticism (1711), Pope uttered his now famous battle cry, “First follow Nature . . . / At once the source, and end, and test of Art.” Cultivating his own garden at Twickenham on the Thames, Pope practiced what he preached with notable flair and became an example and mentor to his friends and neighbors. By 1720, one dined best on architecture and gardens at Burlington House (where Pope was a frequent guest), the London residence of the third earl of Burlington and of his protégé William Kent, architect, designer, and painter. Kent, who was born into modest circumstances in Yorkshire, as a young man of great charm and talent had been taken up by wealthy patrons and sent to study abroad. In Italy, Lord Burlington befriended him, As a result of their Italian sojourn, Lord Burlington became the prime promoter of Palladian architecture in England, and he and Kent also brought back a taste for the Italian Renaissance garden in the softened form captured in seventeenth-century paintings of classical scenes by Claude Lorrain and his contemporaries. William Kent had distinguished himself early on as an architect and designer of furniture as well as an artist (he illustrated Pope’s enterprising translation of the Odyssey with some head- and tail-pieces), but after 1730 he emerged as the greatest practitioner of the new landscape style that epitomized Pope’s edict: “All gardening is landscape painting...