“taught the level plain to swell
In verdant mounds, from whence the eye
Might all their larger works descry,”
and was careful to frame his vistas on the neighbouring landscape, instead of some object near at hand, as Kent and Hamilton were content to do. Though reputedly always in debt, he managed to embellish his grounds on a mere £300 a year, while Hamilton at Pain’s Hill, an estate modelled from the pictures of Poussin and the Italian masters, is reputed (no doubt with exaggeration) to have spent forty thousand pounds on the grotto alone.
In Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening, which has been already quoted, the technique of the artist is revealed. Almost alone among his contemporaries, Shenstone grasps the principles of form in their widest implications, and suggests the modern method of planning in a single sentence. “In designing a house, and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily placed as to exhibit a view of the whole design.” Price, hailed as the originator of our present-day gardens, said very much the same thing. But Shenstone’s chief claim to fame among his contemporaries and the generations immediately following lies in the remark, “I think the landscape painter is the gardener’s best designer,” which was later widely quoted from Unconnected Thoughts as being in direct opposition to Addison’s pronouncement on natural beauty. This remark has been attributed without very good foundation to Kent, but Graves says that, although Kent must have been aware of its implications, Shenstone was the first to make it public. He died in 1763 unconscious of posthumous fame in gardening and in literature, where he is now chiefly remembered as a precursor of the Romantic Movement. His “native elegance of mind” has always had an appeal for the French and his taste for elegiac fragments on urns and seats was not long in finding itself echoed in their gardens. Ermenonville was known as “The Leasowes of France” and contained an inscription to the poet’s memory.
A view of Shenstone’s garden at The Leasowes. “One can regard Shenstone, poet, essayist, and man of taste, as a typical artist of the first phase of the landscape movement.”
THE GROTTO A MANIFESTATION OF THE TASTE FOR “AWFUL BEAUTY” IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GARDEN
VAUX-LE-VICOMTE
From France, where as a frame for sculpture or a shady retreat the grotto exists to grace the formal style, it was imported into England and became the toy of Evelyn and his contemporaries: later the rocky cave beloved of Salvator…
CLAREMONT
… finding its home at last as a means of escape to Arcadia in the gardens of the pictorial landscape style.
PAIN’S HILL
Here in the horrid gloom society shuddered with the poets. An elevating pastime ? Yes, for beauty+horror = sublimity.
OATLANDS PARK
For upwards of 100 years the grotto was part of the background of English social life. This one contained a bath, made for the, Duke of Newcastle late in the 18th century. Each of the four chambers had a dominating shell motif, each passage its shaft of filtered daylight. Convex mirrors, the skeleton ribs of epiphytic fern, bright mineral ores and fragments of Italian sculpture were composed to form a design of such complexity that it occupied a man and his two sons for five years in its construction. The grotto was recently destroyed.
SAINT ANN’S HILL
As a final example, a garden house with stalactite ceiling decorations, symbolical of that translation of garden romanticism into the sphere of architecture which was to affect so disastrously the architecture of the nineteenth century.
II—The Verdant Age
We enter upon the second half of the century with an awareness of the passing of rationalism—“the pleasure of being able to understand, the easy sense of simple orderliness, a smooth balance in ideas as in forms”—and the advent of a quickening sentimental feeling for the past, for exoticism and for the macabre. Poets now hymn their lays “by Tigris’ Wandr’ing Waves,” and the indigenous shepherdess of Shenstone’s inspiration becomes the Persian Maid of Collins. Nature is worshipped more fervently than ever before, but she is beginning to be considered apart from her discoverers, the Salvators and Thomsons. The latter in the concluding parts of The Seasons even finds in her aspects other than those of serenity, savagery and universal omnipotence, while the disillusioned author of Verses Written in London on the Approach of Spring makes bold to question the capacity of the unchallenged masters:
“Can rich Loraine mix up the glowing paint
Bright as Aurora ?… Can savage Rosa
With aught so wildely noble fill the mind,
As where the ancient oak in the wood’s depth
… deserted stands ?”
The painter’s conception of landscape having by this time become widely known, it was beginning to be recognized by a few as slightly artificial, selected, and untrue; in fact, though it was undoubtedly good art, there was just a possibility that it might be bad nature. The artistic pedestal was being removed and the goddess set upon her own feet.
Here is the root of a growing trouble.
We hurry through the intervening years, dodging the shaven hillocks and close-planted clumps of Brown, and passing with difficulty along the zigzag paths of Chambers’ Eastern shrubberies, with nothing more interesting to stay us in our flight than a profusion of temples in conglomerate styles. Gothic and Oriental race neck and neck for supremacy, with Classic, a pale shadow, struggling behind. But when gardens belong to nature and no longer to painted nature, these edifices cease to serve their purpose, existing only to mock the new and echo a vanishing style. Symbolism is dying, and devotees of the new cult seek to justify the use of grottoes, caves and ruins by concealing in them cattle sheds and herdsmen’s hovels or by designing them (how, we are not told) “in a manner naturalized to the trees and woods.”
Top, a “picturesque” cottage for a retainer at Oatlands Park. Left, Kent’s park at Claremont, as improved by Brown. The present mansion is reputed to be the only one ever built by Brown, although he altered many; here the architectural magnificence at which he aimed has somehow not materialized. In 1850 it was possible to write that “… its present royal possessor …