DOI Artikel:
Artykuły i komunikaty
DOI Artikel:Whelan, Agnieszka: Różne oblicza ogrodu regularnego w Anglii w XVII i XVIII wieku
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.49351#0356
348
Agnieszka Whelan
The Regular Garden in England
in the 17th and 18th Centuries
England of the Baroque period experienced
continuous shifts in fashions and ideas. Garden design
followed the pattern of accelerating change, drawing
on a variety of cultural sources. France was closely
watched for grand possibilities in laying out grounds,
and Le Notre was acknowledged as the undisputed
master. Other sources of inspiration came from the
Low Countries, with which England maintained
political alliances and commercial interests while
often identifying itself with republican ideology.
Further south, in Italy, English travellers studied and
embraced the cultural inheritanceof Roman Antiquity
and Italian Renaissance. Gardens created in England
continued to reflect all these interests and diverse
models, and were madę in the styles recognised by
contemporaries as the French, the Italian and the
Dutch ones. Often English gardens were not simply
works in accordance with the established canon, they
were also subject to the local vernacular tradition,
having to refer to the indigenous locality and native
methods of husbandry. With all this in mind it is often
difficult to establish today their precise stylistic
reference relying on pictorial evidence alone. Most
of the regular English gardens have now perished,
and so an empirical experience of them is impossible.
Contemporaries, however, had no difficulties in
distinguishing between the French, or the Dutch, or
Italian form. They were versed in the minutia of style,
often being familiar with the owners’ intentions and
of their intellectual and political standing. The garden
was a public sphere where the boundaries for a style
were set by the visitor’s knowledge rather than by a
visual idiom.
This article sets out to re-establish a basie
framework of assumptions with which a garden
enthusiast visited gardens between 1660 and 1720.
Recent interdisciplinary and complementary thinking
about the regular garden in England has created new
agricultural, archaeological, statistical or archival
perspectives. Historians now consider gardens as part
of the working estate and part of the wider rural
landscape. Here, for the sake of clarity, gardens have
been divided into generalised categories reflecting
their style, rather than being based, for example, on
a division into Carolinian gardens, the gardens of
William and Mary, Queen Annę or those of the early
Georgian period.
Weil before the Restoration of 1660, land and its
management had become an established factor in the
power struggle between the monarchy and parliament.
Land requisitioning to enlarge royal parks with the
particular case of Richmond Park (1636-8), created
violent conflicts. These reflected the huge social
status of parks, where venison was given as an
exclusive token of the owner’s favour. The possession
of land guaranteed a seat in parliament and thus access
to the law-making process. Thus, when Charles I
resolved to extend this right to the smallholders he
disrupted the position of established landowners in
their own counties. This contributed to the violent
developments of the Civil War, the execution of
Charles I in 1649 and the rule of the Commonwealth.
In the aftermath, property rights were reaffirmed by
parliament and became synonymous with individual
liberty. When Charles II ascended the throne of his
father, he was powerless to establish a residence near
Newmarket on the scalę of Versailles, because some
of the land there was already in the possession of
antiroyalist Whigs. His first action after arrivmg in
England was to create a symbolic demesne in
London’s St. James’s Park, beyond Whitehall Pałace,
where he could re-establish himself as a good
husbandsman in charge of his inheritance. As a
democratic gesture intended to soften his image, the
king had his parks at St. James’s and Windsor opened
to the public, free of charge. All the time, however,
he desired a return to absolute power and looked
towards France for the appropriate symbolism, for
gardening ideas and for designers. He engaged Andre
Mollet and his cousin, Gabriel Mollet, to lay our St.
James’s, but his great unrealised ambition was to
bring Le Notre to England. The only preserved sign
of Le N6tre’s involvement in the king’s peremptory
imagery is a design for a terrace at Greenwich, dated
ca. 1663. Charles tried to reereate a world from before
the Ci vil War, where naturę shaped by art willingly
subjected itself to the royal command. All his
projects, at Winchester, Greenwich, Windsor,
Hampton Court and St. James’s, employed devices
concentrating attention on the pałace, which was the
point of origin for the form of patte d’oie, a central
canal reflecting horizon and a key element in the
creating of grand avenues. But the royal budget was
controlled by parliament and acquisition of land by
neighbouring nobles, and so his schemes would never
achieve the required scalę, or indeed the finał shape,
to compare favourably with the great gardens in
France. Nevertheless, the French style was the
preference of great landowners with interests in
political stability or of those close to the throne
Agnieszka Whelan
The Regular Garden in England
in the 17th and 18th Centuries
England of the Baroque period experienced
continuous shifts in fashions and ideas. Garden design
followed the pattern of accelerating change, drawing
on a variety of cultural sources. France was closely
watched for grand possibilities in laying out grounds,
and Le Notre was acknowledged as the undisputed
master. Other sources of inspiration came from the
Low Countries, with which England maintained
political alliances and commercial interests while
often identifying itself with republican ideology.
Further south, in Italy, English travellers studied and
embraced the cultural inheritanceof Roman Antiquity
and Italian Renaissance. Gardens created in England
continued to reflect all these interests and diverse
models, and were madę in the styles recognised by
contemporaries as the French, the Italian and the
Dutch ones. Often English gardens were not simply
works in accordance with the established canon, they
were also subject to the local vernacular tradition,
having to refer to the indigenous locality and native
methods of husbandry. With all this in mind it is often
difficult to establish today their precise stylistic
reference relying on pictorial evidence alone. Most
of the regular English gardens have now perished,
and so an empirical experience of them is impossible.
Contemporaries, however, had no difficulties in
distinguishing between the French, or the Dutch, or
Italian form. They were versed in the minutia of style,
often being familiar with the owners’ intentions and
of their intellectual and political standing. The garden
was a public sphere where the boundaries for a style
were set by the visitor’s knowledge rather than by a
visual idiom.
This article sets out to re-establish a basie
framework of assumptions with which a garden
enthusiast visited gardens between 1660 and 1720.
Recent interdisciplinary and complementary thinking
about the regular garden in England has created new
agricultural, archaeological, statistical or archival
perspectives. Historians now consider gardens as part
of the working estate and part of the wider rural
landscape. Here, for the sake of clarity, gardens have
been divided into generalised categories reflecting
their style, rather than being based, for example, on
a division into Carolinian gardens, the gardens of
William and Mary, Queen Annę or those of the early
Georgian period.
Weil before the Restoration of 1660, land and its
management had become an established factor in the
power struggle between the monarchy and parliament.
Land requisitioning to enlarge royal parks with the
particular case of Richmond Park (1636-8), created
violent conflicts. These reflected the huge social
status of parks, where venison was given as an
exclusive token of the owner’s favour. The possession
of land guaranteed a seat in parliament and thus access
to the law-making process. Thus, when Charles I
resolved to extend this right to the smallholders he
disrupted the position of established landowners in
their own counties. This contributed to the violent
developments of the Civil War, the execution of
Charles I in 1649 and the rule of the Commonwealth.
In the aftermath, property rights were reaffirmed by
parliament and became synonymous with individual
liberty. When Charles II ascended the throne of his
father, he was powerless to establish a residence near
Newmarket on the scalę of Versailles, because some
of the land there was already in the possession of
antiroyalist Whigs. His first action after arrivmg in
England was to create a symbolic demesne in
London’s St. James’s Park, beyond Whitehall Pałace,
where he could re-establish himself as a good
husbandsman in charge of his inheritance. As a
democratic gesture intended to soften his image, the
king had his parks at St. James’s and Windsor opened
to the public, free of charge. All the time, however,
he desired a return to absolute power and looked
towards France for the appropriate symbolism, for
gardening ideas and for designers. He engaged Andre
Mollet and his cousin, Gabriel Mollet, to lay our St.
James’s, but his great unrealised ambition was to
bring Le Notre to England. The only preserved sign
of Le N6tre’s involvement in the king’s peremptory
imagery is a design for a terrace at Greenwich, dated
ca. 1663. Charles tried to reereate a world from before
the Ci vil War, where naturę shaped by art willingly
subjected itself to the royal command. All his
projects, at Winchester, Greenwich, Windsor,
Hampton Court and St. James’s, employed devices
concentrating attention on the pałace, which was the
point of origin for the form of patte d’oie, a central
canal reflecting horizon and a key element in the
creating of grand avenues. But the royal budget was
controlled by parliament and acquisition of land by
neighbouring nobles, and so his schemes would never
achieve the required scalę, or indeed the finał shape,
to compare favourably with the great gardens in
France. Nevertheless, the French style was the
preference of great landowners with interests in
political stability or of those close to the throne