Time for a road trip to New Haven, to the Sterling Memorial Library, 120 High Street, at Yale University. Drawing on the collections of the Center for British Art, Moving Earth shows how landscape gardeners relocated vast quantities of soil, water, and plant life to reshape English scenery. The exhibit runs now through May 20.
As one of England’s greatest aesthetic achievements, the English landscape garden has become a well-known and defining characteristic of the country. With large sweeping expanses of lush green fields, groupings of trees, winding paths, and serpentine-shaped rivers and lakes, the English landscape appears as an ideal form of nature; it is, however, an expertly crafted construct. Countless hours of moving and reconstructing vast volumes of earth, water, trees and shrubbery demonstrate what can be achieved when combined with careful planning, design and an eye towards nature. Moving Earth explores the creation of the English Landscape through the advent of landscape gardening and the pioneering work of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton.
This exhibition opens with examples of early English formal gardens comprised of geometrical patterns, topiaries, and planted parterres and examines the return to nature as seen through literary criticisms and notions from Addison and Pope. The focus of Moving Earth is on the prolific landscape gardener, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, and his successor Humphry Repton. To fully consider the development of landscape in Georgian England the exhibition highlights architects, such as William Kent and Sir John Vanbrugh, as well the ‘Picturesque’ controversy and criticisms from Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price, and William Gilpin, that surrounded this emerging field.
Presented prominently throughout this exhibition are materials from the Yale Center for British Art, including the Reference Library and Archives, and reproductions from the Rare Books and Manuscripts, Prints and Drawings, and Paintings Collections. Moving Earth showcases the extent and range of materials available for research, and the depth and scope to which these concepts, ideas, and topics can be fully examined. This exhibition features an abundance of both primary and secondary resources available at the Center that provides the foundational basis for research into British art, culture and society. Image of Repton’s Dyrham Park from www.gardenvisit.com.
