The Georgian era is often seen as the pinnacle of garden design in England, as the formal, baroque style of the late 17th century gave way to the looser, more naturalistic designs of what became known as the English Landscape Movement. It was a style that spread around the world.
This Gardens Trust online series will trace the development of the landscape style, beginning with early examples full of decorative garden buildings and classical allusions, and then the impact of England’s most famous landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who laid out vast parklands with rolling lawns, serpentine lakes and clumps of trees. As we’ll see, the century ended with a clash between the wild, rugged aesthetic of the Picturesque and the start of a return to formality and ornamentation in garden-making.
As well as examining individual gardens and designers, we will explore some of the myriad social and economic influences at work on Georgian design. These included political upheaval, changing land use, foreign trade and the lure of exoticism, alongside the impact of the European ‘Grand Tour’ undertaken by wealthy men, which instilled an admiration for classical art and poetry, and for French and Italian landscape painting.
The first of the series of five lectures begins Tuesday, November 5 with Oliver Cox. Often presented as a dramatic shift, the change from baroque designs to the landscape style, in reality, happened gradually over many years. Early glimpses of irregular layouts and whimsical features started to appear alongside the blurring of boundaries between gardens and the wider rural landscape. With wars in Europe and shifting political values at home, there was perhaps a desire for a less grandiose, more patriotic garden style, and so stiff baroque geometry slowly softened into gentler glades, serpentine lakes, irregularly placed garden buildings and allusions to classical and British myths and legends. Designers such as Charles Bridgeman and William Kent (who memorably ‘leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden’) were among the leading figures in the emerging naturalistic style.
Many significant 18th-century gardens – Chiswick House, Rousham, Castle Howard, Studley Royal, Stowe and Stourhead – remain today as well-loved visitor attractions, and their stories have much to tell us about the values, influences and aesthetics of the early landscape garden-makers.
Dr Oliver Cox is a historian by training and received his undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. His recent publications include contributions to The Country House: Past, Present and Future (Rizzoli International Publications, 2018); Sport and Leisure in the Irish and British Country House (Four Courts Press, 2019), and journal articles including the challenges of interpreting eighteenth-century spaces for twenty-first-century visitors. He also writes regularly for Apollo and is a frequent contributor to television and radio programs. Currently, he is Head of Academic Partnerships at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
This ticket link is for the third series of 5 talks in our History of Gardens Course at £35 or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8 via the links found at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-history-of-gardens-3-tickets-1011314337407. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25).
Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks afterwards. Image below: Coplestone Warre Bampfylde, The Grotto, Stourhead, 1753. Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
