Overview

This extraordinarily beautiful book gathers together and examines for the first time a delightful collection of English gardens rendered by artists from 1540 to the early nineteenth century, many of which are unknown. Sir Roy Strong, widely recognized for his expertise in both art history and garden history, surveys garden pictures ranging from Elizabethan miniatures to eighteenth-century alfresco conversation pieces, from suites of paintings of a single garden to amateur watercolors. He inquires into the origin of the English garden picture genre, its development prior to the invention of photography, its greatest exponents, its reliability as historical evidence of actual gardens, and its place within the larger European tradition of picturing the garden. The English, Strong observes, were slow in picturing the reality of their gardens. Until well into the Stuart age, the garden in art served as a symbol, and only gradually did this give way to the impulse to record the facts of contemporary garden-making. In the backgrounds of portraits of Jacobean and Caroline garden owners, the garden is no longer an emblem; it becomes instead a document demonstrating the owners' pride in their gardens made in the new Renaissance manner. By the Georgian age the garden has moved from the back to the foreground of pictures, and whole families place themselves amid the glory of their self-fashioned landscapes. Both house and garden at this point assume a separate identity, each calling for an individual record. And by the nineteenth century, the author shows, the garden detaches itself from owner and house to be recorded for its own sake, as a single image at first, and later in a series. With some 350 fully annotated illustrations, this lovely book offers a unique record of three hundred years of English gardens and what they meant to those who owned and portrayed them.

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9780300085204

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Reviews

The title may suggest Monet or perhaps Bonnard, but this is a far more scholarly and focused study, concentrating on the English garden between 1540 and the 19th century. Sir Roy Strong takes us from Peake and Gheeraerts the Elder to the familiar beauty of Constable on the way introducing us to a multitude of unknown Artists. The book has two strengths. One is its emphasis on the garden, and how the concept has developed. We are shown the garden as a symbol, Edenic surrogate, as status provider, as setting, as part of a topographical survey, as series of aesthetic panoramas. The early gardens concertrate on pattern, as in the Knot gardens, meant to be seen from above, and change over the centuries into the garden as experience, meant to be walked through, to be played in. But of equal importance to the garden theme, both illustrating it and a pleasure in itself, is Strong's expertise in the artists. Although he studies works for their gardening importance, in so doing he introduces us to image upon image that give undiluted visual delight. There are paintings and prints of the seminal gardens, such as Stowe or Wilton, and also of the less famous but charming gardens at Hartwell House or Claremount. Text and illustration are splendidly aligned, and even the most urban of readers, will come to the end with a contented sigh. Review by Sister Wendy Editor's note: (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Roy Strong is former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London and of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He is now a full-time writer, broadcaster, consultant, and gardener. Among those he has assisted in his capacity as a garden consultant are the Prince of Wales, Gianni Versace, and Elton John.

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