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By the latter
half of the 18th century the gardens of Versailles were old hat:
symmetry was out, formal arrangements of trees and water in
geometric designs were passé, evergreens in parterres de
broderie had come undone. Romantic gardens were in: now
a heightened sensitivity to nature, ‘landscaped gardens’ that had
winding paths, scenery that unfolded as one walked, a wild
profusion of plantings, all following 17th century developments in
landscape painting, especially the pastorals and wilderness scenes
of painters like Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator
Rosa that favored majestic scenery, idyllic vistas, a certain
sentimental mistiness, romantic ruins, and often, rustic figures
like shepherds.
And all this
paralleled literary developments: Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey,
Alexander Pope’s 1731 Epistle to Burlington (the original
manuscript on display at the Morgan show) on architecture and
landscaping, where he talks of ‘spontaneous beauties,’ takes on
Versailles, and says:
To build,
to plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the
column, or the arch to bend,
To swell the
terrace, or to sink the grot;
In all, let
Nature never be forgot.
Alexander
Pope's own house (with grotto) at Twickenham
And from
Edmund Burke’s 1756 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful the idea of the
picturesque (which is so essential to the idea of the romantic
garden) as finding the meeting ground between the sublime
(awe-inspiring nature, the delight from that ‘frisson of terror’)
and the beautiful. Jane Austen wove picturesque landscape
views into her novels. In
Pride and
Prejudice
(and unfortunately, in Emma as well!) the courtship is
sealed outside, in nature, on a woodland path and in a garden
respectively.
The question
was how does a man’s art follow nature? An indication might
be in the way he landscaped his garden. And Elizabeth
Bennet’s first reaction to Pemberley:
“She had
never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where
natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward
taste....Every disposition of the ground was good; and she looked
on the whole scene, the river, the trees scattered on its banks,
and the winding of the valley, as far as she could trace it, with
delight”
So here in
New York we had Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux win the
competition for the design of Central Park with their
Greensward Plan in 1858, following in the Romantic tradition.
So remember ladies, when Romeo leads you up the garden path, the
question to ask, according to Jane Austen, is always:
“Darcy,
Darcy, how does your garden grow?”
Indoors:
Romantic Gardens@The Morgan Library (complete with landscaping
plans, and Romantic paintings and original manuscripts)
Outdoors:
Take a
Romantic Walk in Central Park
Read:
Pride and
Prejudice, Jane Austen
From the
eCognoscente
Archives:
On Rereading
Pride and Prejudice
Tags:
literature design
architecture
library
jane austen
books
gardens
Romantic
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