Boston Flora

Tag: John Ruskin

  • Thursday, March 30, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Standen and the Beales: an Expression of Arts and Crafts, Online

    Standen’s garden was created around the house designed by Philip Webb for the Beale family in 1894. Webb laid out the garden in keeping with the arts and crafts ethos of the house, but the planting reflects the middle-class artistic taste of Margaret Beale, an amateur gardener who recorded her successes and failures over nearly fifty years in her garden diary. This March 30 Sussex Gardens Trust talk will examine the origins of the garden and its development in the context of arts and crafts principles, and will consider the recent restoration of the garden by the National Trust.

    Dr Caroline Ikin is a Curator at the National Trust with a specialism in garden history. She has previously worked in museums and for the Gardens Trust and her research interest is in nineteenth century art, architecture and gardens. Caroline is author of The Victorian Garden (Shire, 2012), The Victorian Gardener (Shire, 2014), The Kitchen Garden (Amberley, 2017), and is currently working on a new survey of Victorian gardens to be published by Bloomsbury and the National Trust. Caroline has written for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Garden History, the National Trust Cultural Heritage Magazine, Museums Journal and various other publications, and was awarded the Mavis Batey Essay Prize in 2022. She has lectured widely, including for the Gardens Trust, V&A, Watts Gallery, Sussex Gardens Trust, Oxford University, and Furniture History Society, as well as presenting conference papers. Her PhD thesis, titled ‘Reading Ruskin in the Garden: the designed landscape at Brantwood 1871-1900’, explored John Ruskin’s garden through the lens of his late published works.

    The lecture will be presented on Zoom. Registrants will receive a Zoom link ahead of the lecture, and a recording will be available for one week following the talk. £5.00 Register HERE.

  • Friday, May 21 – Sunday, August 29 – Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design

    The pen and ink drawing that won Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux the commission to design Central Park, and a drawing by J.M.W. Turner, former owned by John Ruskin, are among the treasures in “Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design,” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, running from May 21 through August 29.   Scenic vistas, winding paths, bucolic meadows, and rustic retreats suitable for solitary contemplation are just a few of the alluring naturalistic features of gardens created in the Romantic spirit. Landscape designers of the Romantic era sought to express the inherent beauty of nature in opposition to the strictly symmetrical, formal gardens favored by aristocrats of the old regime.

    The Romantics looked to nature as a liberating force, a source of sensual pleasure, moral instruction, religious insight, and artistic inspiration. Eloquent exponents of these ideals, they extolled the mystical powers of nature and argued for more sympathetic styles of garden design in books, manuscripts, and drawings, now regarded as core documents of the Romantic Movement. Their cult of inner beauty and their view of the outside world dominated European thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

    The exhibition features approximately ninety highly influential texts and outstanding works of art, providing a compelling overview of ideas championed by the Romantics and also implemented by them in private estates and public parks in Europe and the United States, notably New York’s Central Park. If you plan to be in New York during that period, don’t miss this rare treat.  For information and hours, call 212-685-0008, or log on to www.themorgan.org.

    View of the Welbeck Estate, Humphry Repton (1752–1818), Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (London, 1794). PML 46448. Gift of Henry S. Morgan and Junius S. Morgan, 1954. Photography, Graham Haber, 2009.