This series of Gardens Trust illustrated lectures will explore the impact and legacy of empire, colonialism and enslavement on western garden and landscape history. Our aim is to bring back some of the voices usually absent from this history, to identify and fill gaps in our collective knowledge, and to explore new ways of engaging with the whole history of gardens, landscapes and horticulture.
The diverse range of topics and speakers will offer a new range of perspectives on the history of gardens and landscapes and suggest more inclusive ways of presenting and interpreting their stories. The series does not aim to point fingers or to encourage hand-wringing but is more a celebration of voices starting to be heard.
This talk on April 26 at 2 pm Eastern is the third in our series aiming to hear voices previously absent from our garden history:
When William III commissioned a pair of kneeling slaves for the privy garden at Hampton Court palace, he initiated a new genre of British garden sculpture. As the product of a culture that valued the profitability of the Atlantic slave economy, The Blackamoor, a.k.a. The Kneeling Slave, became the most popular of all the lead statues made for British gardens in the 18th century. Unlike the visualising Blackamoor, the source of income remained invisible in landscape gardens – as exemplified by Harewood in Yorkshire, where both ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton were consulted.
This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the link, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 10 sessions at a cost of £40 (students £15) via the link here.
Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and a link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
Dr Patrick Eyres is editor of the unique, artist-illustrated New Arcadian Journal, which engages with the cultural politics of designed landscapes (53 editions since 1981: www.newarcadianpress.co.uk). He has also published in numerous other books and journals, most recently in Penny Florence (ed.), Thinking The Sculpture Garden (2020). For many years he served on the boards of the Little Sparta Trust, Garden History Society, Leeds Art Fund, and Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust. On behalf of The Gardens Trust, he set up and chaired for the first ten years the annual New Research Symposium in Garden History.