The first history of the English landscape garden, by a writer who had watched it happen: a brief account of gardens from Eden to the clipped garden of the seventeenth century, followed by the story of how Bridgeman, Kent and Brown threw down the walls.
Horace Walpole (1717–1797), son of the prime minister Robert Walpole and builder of the Gothic house at Strawberry Hill, wrote the essay about 1770 as a chapter of his Anecdotes of Painting in England. It was printed with the fourth volume in 1771 but not issued until 1780, and appeared on its own with a French translation in 1785.
Walpole treats the landscape garden as an English invention and a liberation. He credits Charles Bridgeman with the sunk fence, which the common people, surprised at being stopped by a ditch they had not seen, called a ha-ha, and he calls William Kent the inventor of the art, a painter who “leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden”. Kent composed with light and shade and with groups of trees, as a painter composes, and broke the straight canal into a winding stream. Walpole’s view that the formal garden had been a kind of tyranny, and Kent its liberator, shaped the history of the English garden for two centuries.
The book, part by part
I Ancient and medieval gardens
Eden, the gardens of Alcinous in Homer, Pliny’s villas, and the walled and clipped gardens that followed them.
II The seventeenth-century garden
Le Nôtre, the Dutch taste, topiary and the regularity Walpole dislikes.
III Bridgeman, Kent and their successors
The sunk fence; Kent the painter in the landscape; Stowe, Rousham, Claremont; the ferme ornée; Brown, briefly.
Rules: The ha-ha: a boundary that cannot be seen · The garden as a picture