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Picturesque Gardens

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All eighteenth century English landscape gardens are picturesque, in the sense that they were intended to look like landscape paintings. There was some influence from Chinese paintings, mainly on wallpaper and ceramics; but the dominant influence was from European landscape paintings, especially the paintings of Claude Lorraine, Gaspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa.

The style of the English landscape garden was dominated by three designers: William Kent, Lancelot (Capability) Brown and Humphrey Repton. All three tended to create similar landscapes which were composed of trees and water and smooth lawns. By the 1790s there was a reaction against their rather bland compositions; a number of thinkers began to promote the idea of picturesque gardens.

The leader of the picturesque movement was the Reverend William Gilpin (1724 - 1804). He was an accomplished artist who did sketches of the natural landscapes of the various parts of the British Isles that he visited. Like many romantics, he preferred untamed nature over gardens; he felt that the professional landscape designers, especially Capability Brown, were imposing stereotypical design solutions onto the landscape, instead of responding to the natural topography.

When he became Vicar of Bouldre in 1778, Gilpin became fascinated by the surrounding forest. In 1791 he published his Remarks on Forest Scenery, in which he wrote about the picturesque appeal of twisted trees, exposed roots and irregular land forms. In 1792 Gilpin published an essay in which he wrote that while beauty is usually associated with the smooth and the neat, such as the gently sculpted landscapes of Capability Brown with their smooth lawns leading down to placid lakes; picturesque beauty tends to have a wilder quality with rougher textures. In Gilpin's view, the gardens of Brown and his followers "are never picturesque. They want the bold wildness of nature. A principle beauty of our gardens, as Mr. Walpole justly observes, is the smoothness of turf; but in a picture, this becomes a dead and uniform spot; incapable of light and shade".

Gilpin didn't dislike all landscape gardens, he felt the garden of Stourhead showed "greatness of design"; he also wasn't really Capability Brown's enemy, he admired the "nobility" of Brown's landscaping at Longleat house. Humphrey Repton was influenced by Gilpins ideas, especially the idea that the design of a garden should harmonize with the surrounding landforms; it was a bit of a shock for Repton when he found himself embroiled in a heated controversy about picturesque gardens versus the typical gardens of Capability Brown. Repton was quite open about how much his designs owed to Capability Brown, and by the early 1790s he was becoming Brown's successor, so he was the perfect target for those who disliked Brown's gardens.

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