Author: Ian Waites
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 1843837617
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
An examination of the treatment of common land in the work of English painters, at a time when much of it was to disappear forever. A most elegantly written book that calmly knocked many entrenched but erroneous notions about British landscape painting firmly on the head. Longlisted and commended by the judges of the 2013 William M. B. Berger prize forBritish art history. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of England's common land was eradicated by the processes of parliamentary enclosure. However, despite the fact that the landscape was frequentlyviewed as unproductive, outmoded and unsightly, many British landscape painters of the time - including Constable, Gainsborough and Turner - resolutely continued to depict it. This book is the first full study of how they did so, using evidence drawn not only from art-historical picture analysis, but from contemporary poems and novels, and the contemporary pamphlets, essays and reports that advanced the rhetoric of both agricultural improvement and new theories on landscape aesthetics. It highlights a deep-rooted social and cultural attachment to the common field landscape, and demonstrates that common land played a significant but - until now - underestimated role in both the history of English art and of the formation of an English national identity, reflecting what are still highly sensitive issues of progress, nostalgia and loss within the English countryside. Recasting common land as a recurrentfacet of English culture in the modern period, the numerous paintings, drawings and prints featured in this book give the reader a comprehensive and evocative sense of what this now almost wholly lost landscape looked like in itshey-day. Ian Waites is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Lincoln.
Common Land in English Painting, 1700-1850
Author: Ian Waites
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 1843837617
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
An examination of the treatment of common land in the work of English painters, at a time when much of it was to disappear forever. A most elegantly written book that calmly knocked many entrenched but erroneous notions about British landscape painting firmly on the head. Longlisted and commended by the judges of the 2013 William M. B. Berger prize forBritish art history. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of England's common land was eradicated by the processes of parliamentary enclosure. However, despite the fact that the landscape was frequentlyviewed as unproductive, outmoded and unsightly, many British landscape painters of the time - including Constable, Gainsborough and Turner - resolutely continued to depict it. This book is the first full study of how they did so, using evidence drawn not only from art-historical picture analysis, but from contemporary poems and novels, and the contemporary pamphlets, essays and reports that advanced the rhetoric of both agricultural improvement and new theories on landscape aesthetics. It highlights a deep-rooted social and cultural attachment to the common field landscape, and demonstrates that common land played a significant but - until now - underestimated role in both the history of English art and of the formation of an English national identity, reflecting what are still highly sensitive issues of progress, nostalgia and loss within the English countryside. Recasting common land as a recurrentfacet of English culture in the modern period, the numerous paintings, drawings and prints featured in this book give the reader a comprehensive and evocative sense of what this now almost wholly lost landscape looked like in itshey-day. Ian Waites is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Lincoln.
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 1843837617
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
An examination of the treatment of common land in the work of English painters, at a time when much of it was to disappear forever. A most elegantly written book that calmly knocked many entrenched but erroneous notions about British landscape painting firmly on the head. Longlisted and commended by the judges of the 2013 William M. B. Berger prize forBritish art history. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of England's common land was eradicated by the processes of parliamentary enclosure. However, despite the fact that the landscape was frequentlyviewed as unproductive, outmoded and unsightly, many British landscape painters of the time - including Constable, Gainsborough and Turner - resolutely continued to depict it. This book is the first full study of how they did so, using evidence drawn not only from art-historical picture analysis, but from contemporary poems and novels, and the contemporary pamphlets, essays and reports that advanced the rhetoric of both agricultural improvement and new theories on landscape aesthetics. It highlights a deep-rooted social and cultural attachment to the common field landscape, and demonstrates that common land played a significant but - until now - underestimated role in both the history of English art and of the formation of an English national identity, reflecting what are still highly sensitive issues of progress, nostalgia and loss within the English countryside. Recasting common land as a recurrentfacet of English culture in the modern period, the numerous paintings, drawings and prints featured in this book give the reader a comprehensive and evocative sense of what this now almost wholly lost landscape looked like in itshey-day. Ian Waites is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Lincoln.
Common Land in English Painting, 1700-1850
Author: Ian Waites
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786613978455
Category : Commons
Languages : en
Pages : 181
Book Description
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of England's common land was eradicated by the processes of parliamentary enclosure. However, despite the fact that the landscape was frequently viewed as unproductive, outmoded and unsightly, many British landscape painters of the time - including Constable, Gainsborough and Turner - resolutely continued to depict it. This book is the first full study of how they did so, using evidence drawn not only from art-historical picture analysis, but from contemporary poems and novels, and the contemporary pamphlets, essays and reports that advanced the rhetoric of both agricultural improvement and new theories on landscape aesthetics. It highlights a deep-rooted social and cultural attachment to the common field landscape, and demonstrates that common land played a significant but - until now - underestimated role in both the history of English art and of the formation of an English national identity, reflecting what are still highly sensitive issues of progress, nostalgia and loss within the English countryside. Recasting common land as a recurrent facet of English culture in the modern period, the numerous paintings, drawings and prints featured in this book give the reader a comprehensive and evocative sense of what this now almost wholly lost landscape looked like in its hey-day. Ian Waites is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Lincoln.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786613978455
Category : Commons
Languages : en
Pages : 181
Book Description
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of England's common land was eradicated by the processes of parliamentary enclosure. However, despite the fact that the landscape was frequently viewed as unproductive, outmoded and unsightly, many British landscape painters of the time - including Constable, Gainsborough and Turner - resolutely continued to depict it. This book is the first full study of how they did so, using evidence drawn not only from art-historical picture analysis, but from contemporary poems and novels, and the contemporary pamphlets, essays and reports that advanced the rhetoric of both agricultural improvement and new theories on landscape aesthetics. It highlights a deep-rooted social and cultural attachment to the common field landscape, and demonstrates that common land played a significant but - until now - underestimated role in both the history of English art and of the formation of an English national identity, reflecting what are still highly sensitive issues of progress, nostalgia and loss within the English countryside. Recasting common land as a recurrent facet of English culture in the modern period, the numerous paintings, drawings and prints featured in this book give the reader a comprehensive and evocative sense of what this now almost wholly lost landscape looked like in its hey-day. Ian Waites is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Lincoln.
Common Land in Britain
Author: Angus J L Winchester
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277432
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
The first authoritative survey of the history of common land in Great Britain from the medieval period to present day.
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277432
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
The first authoritative survey of the history of common land in Great Britain from the medieval period to present day.
The Non-Representation of the Agricultural Labourers in 18th and 19th Century English Paintings
Author: Penelope McElwee
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443888745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213
Book Description
The life of the poor rural worker appears to have been one of unmitigated toil within an unequal society, a reality seldom endorsed in paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The contemporary viewer, who constituted less than three per cent of the population, wished to see visions of the idyllic golden landscapes of Merrie England peopled by happy contented workers, or, alternatively, images of the Big House, a feature and phenomenon now marching over the countryside, fed by a new building frenzy. This particular element would soon evolve into an all-consuming preoccupation for the wealthy throughout the period. Members of the upper echelons of society, with their families all attired in fine silks and satins, look out at their audience from ornately framed canvases as individuals. Yet the rural poor, the rabble at the gates, the unseen workforce, who toiled at the behest of the Master, are virtually unknown. They have left few records. Enclosure came at a price. The Poorhouse beckoned. And still the agricultural labourer did virtually nothing, for most of the eighteenth century, to protest or rebel against the inequalities of his downtrodden existence. Only the dreaded behemoth of the nineteenth century, the threshing machine, would stir him into action. How would it end?
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443888745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213
Book Description
The life of the poor rural worker appears to have been one of unmitigated toil within an unequal society, a reality seldom endorsed in paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The contemporary viewer, who constituted less than three per cent of the population, wished to see visions of the idyllic golden landscapes of Merrie England peopled by happy contented workers, or, alternatively, images of the Big House, a feature and phenomenon now marching over the countryside, fed by a new building frenzy. This particular element would soon evolve into an all-consuming preoccupation for the wealthy throughout the period. Members of the upper echelons of society, with their families all attired in fine silks and satins, look out at their audience from ornately framed canvases as individuals. Yet the rural poor, the rabble at the gates, the unseen workforce, who toiled at the behest of the Master, are virtually unknown. They have left few records. Enclosure came at a price. The Poorhouse beckoned. And still the agricultural labourer did virtually nothing, for most of the eighteenth century, to protest or rebel against the inequalities of his downtrodden existence. Only the dreaded behemoth of the nineteenth century, the threshing machine, would stir him into action. How would it end?
A Sweet View
Author: Malcolm Andrews
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144973
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
From country lanes to thatch roofs, a stroll through the enduring appeal of the nineteenth-century trope of rural English bliss. A Sweet View explores how writers and artists in the nineteenth century shaped the English countryside as a partly imaginary idyll, with its distinctive repertoire of idealized scenery: the village green, the old country churchyard, hedgerows and cottages, scenic variety concentrated into a small compass, snugness and comfort. The book draws on a very wide range of contemporary sources and features some of the key makers of the “South Country” rural idyll, including Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster, and Richard Jefferies. The legacy of the idyll still influences popular perceptions of the essential character of a certain kind of English landscape—indeed for Henry James that imagery constituted “the very essence of England” itself. As A Sweet View makes clear, the countryside idyll forged over a century ago is still with us today.
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144973
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
From country lanes to thatch roofs, a stroll through the enduring appeal of the nineteenth-century trope of rural English bliss. A Sweet View explores how writers and artists in the nineteenth century shaped the English countryside as a partly imaginary idyll, with its distinctive repertoire of idealized scenery: the village green, the old country churchyard, hedgerows and cottages, scenic variety concentrated into a small compass, snugness and comfort. The book draws on a very wide range of contemporary sources and features some of the key makers of the “South Country” rural idyll, including Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster, and Richard Jefferies. The legacy of the idyll still influences popular perceptions of the essential character of a certain kind of English landscape—indeed for Henry James that imagery constituted “the very essence of England” itself. As A Sweet View makes clear, the countryside idyll forged over a century ago is still with us today.
Against the Commons
Author: Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452968020
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
An alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons Characterized by shared, self-managed access to food, housing, and the basic conditions for a creative life, the commons are essential for communities to flourish and protect spaces of collective autonomy from capitalist encroachment. In a narrative spanning more than three centuries, Against the Commons provides a radical counterhistory of urban planning that explores how capitalism and spatial politics have evolved to address this challenge. Highlighting episodes from preindustrial England, New York City and Chicago between the 1850s and the early 1900s, Weimar-era Berlin, and neoliberal Milan, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago shows how capitalist urbanization has eroded the egalitarian, convivial life-worlds around the commons. The book combines detailed archival research with provocative critical theory to illuminate past and ongoing struggles over land, shared resources, public space, neighborhoods, creativity, and spatial imaginaries. Against the Commons underscores the ways urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending particular awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is ultimately defined by the people who inhabit them.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452968020
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
An alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons Characterized by shared, self-managed access to food, housing, and the basic conditions for a creative life, the commons are essential for communities to flourish and protect spaces of collective autonomy from capitalist encroachment. In a narrative spanning more than three centuries, Against the Commons provides a radical counterhistory of urban planning that explores how capitalism and spatial politics have evolved to address this challenge. Highlighting episodes from preindustrial England, New York City and Chicago between the 1850s and the early 1900s, Weimar-era Berlin, and neoliberal Milan, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago shows how capitalist urbanization has eroded the egalitarian, convivial life-worlds around the commons. The book combines detailed archival research with provocative critical theory to illuminate past and ongoing struggles over land, shared resources, public space, neighborhoods, creativity, and spatial imaginaries. Against the Commons underscores the ways urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending particular awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is ultimately defined by the people who inhabit them.
Power Misses II
Author: David E. James
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969766
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Book Description
Like David James' earlier collection of essays, Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (1996), the present volume, Power Misses II: Cinema, Asian and Modern is concerned with popular cultural activity that propose alternatives and opposition to capitalist media. Now with a wider frame of reference, it moves globally from west to east, beginning with films made during the Korean Democracy Movement, and then turning to socialist realism in China and Taiwan, and to Asian American film and poetry in Los Angeles. Several other avant-garde film movements in L.A. created communities resistant to the culture industries centered there, as did elements in the classic New York avant-garde, here instanced in the work of Ken Jacobs and Andy Warhol. The final chapter concerns little-known films about communal agriculture in the Nottinghamshire village of Laxton, the only one where the medieval open-field system never suffered enclosure. This survival of the commons anticipated resistance to the extreme and catastrophic forms of privatization, monetization, and theft of the public commonweal in the advanced form of capitalism we know as neoliberalism.
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969766
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Book Description
Like David James' earlier collection of essays, Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (1996), the present volume, Power Misses II: Cinema, Asian and Modern is concerned with popular cultural activity that propose alternatives and opposition to capitalist media. Now with a wider frame of reference, it moves globally from west to east, beginning with films made during the Korean Democracy Movement, and then turning to socialist realism in China and Taiwan, and to Asian American film and poetry in Los Angeles. Several other avant-garde film movements in L.A. created communities resistant to the culture industries centered there, as did elements in the classic New York avant-garde, here instanced in the work of Ken Jacobs and Andy Warhol. The final chapter concerns little-known films about communal agriculture in the Nottinghamshire village of Laxton, the only one where the medieval open-field system never suffered enclosure. This survival of the commons anticipated resistance to the extreme and catastrophic forms of privatization, monetization, and theft of the public commonweal in the advanced form of capitalism we know as neoliberalism.
Art and Protest
Author: Charlotte Yeldham
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111025454
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 88
Book Description
Following official protection of natural environments for public benefit in Fontainebleau Forest in France (1861) and in Yosemite (1864) and Yellowstone (1872) in the USA, the New Forest Act of 1877 marked the first major instance in Britain. Art and artists were involved in this achievement to a greater extent than in all preceding cases. For the first time, and within an ecocritical framework, this study examines the role played by art during the previous anti-enclosure campaign – highlighting both the hitherto-unacknowledged extent of German influence in terms of the original artistic initiative and of German artists’ participation in the cause, as well as the significance of connections between landscape art of the day and priorities of the early Open Spaces movement. Ecocriticism in art history With works by the German and British artists George Bouverie Goddard, Wilhelm Kümpel, Alfred Pizzi Newton, Wilhelm Trautschold, Edmund George Warren
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111025454
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 88
Book Description
Following official protection of natural environments for public benefit in Fontainebleau Forest in France (1861) and in Yosemite (1864) and Yellowstone (1872) in the USA, the New Forest Act of 1877 marked the first major instance in Britain. Art and artists were involved in this achievement to a greater extent than in all preceding cases. For the first time, and within an ecocritical framework, this study examines the role played by art during the previous anti-enclosure campaign – highlighting both the hitherto-unacknowledged extent of German influence in terms of the original artistic initiative and of German artists’ participation in the cause, as well as the significance of connections between landscape art of the day and priorities of the early Open Spaces movement. Ecocriticism in art history With works by the German and British artists George Bouverie Goddard, Wilhelm Kümpel, Alfred Pizzi Newton, Wilhelm Trautschold, Edmund George Warren
Landscape into Eco Art
Author: Mark Cheetham
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271081406
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
Dedicated to an articulation of the earth from broadly ecological perspectives, eco art is a vibrant subset of contemporary art that addresses the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. In Landscape into Eco Art, Mark Cheetham systematically examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the historical genre of landscape painting. Through eight thematic case studies that illuminate what eco art means in practice, reception, and history, Cheetham places the form in a longer and broader art-historical context. He considers a wide range of media—from painting, sculpture, and photography to artists’ films, video, sound work, animation, and installation—and analyzes the work of internationally prominent artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Holt, Mark Dion, and Robert Smithson. In doing so, Cheetham reveals eco art to be a dynamic extension of a long tradition of landscape depiction in the West that boldly enters into today’s debates on climate science, government policy, and our collective and individual responsibility to the planet. An ambitious intervention into eco-criticism and the environmental humanities, this volume provides original ways to understand the issues and practices of eco art in the Anthropocene. Art historians, humanities scholars, and lay readers interested in contemporary art and the environment will find Cheetham’s work valuable and invigorating.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271081406
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
Dedicated to an articulation of the earth from broadly ecological perspectives, eco art is a vibrant subset of contemporary art that addresses the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. In Landscape into Eco Art, Mark Cheetham systematically examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the historical genre of landscape painting. Through eight thematic case studies that illuminate what eco art means in practice, reception, and history, Cheetham places the form in a longer and broader art-historical context. He considers a wide range of media—from painting, sculpture, and photography to artists’ films, video, sound work, animation, and installation—and analyzes the work of internationally prominent artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Holt, Mark Dion, and Robert Smithson. In doing so, Cheetham reveals eco art to be a dynamic extension of a long tradition of landscape depiction in the West that boldly enters into today’s debates on climate science, government policy, and our collective and individual responsibility to the planet. An ambitious intervention into eco-criticism and the environmental humanities, this volume provides original ways to understand the issues and practices of eco art in the Anthropocene. Art historians, humanities scholars, and lay readers interested in contemporary art and the environment will find Cheetham’s work valuable and invigorating.
Charles Bridgeman (c. 1685-1738)
Author: Susan Haynes
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837651175
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
An examination of the garden plans of eighteenth-century landscape architect Charles Bridgeman, shedding light on his artistic vision and contributions to English garden history.Charles Bridgeman was a popular and highly successful landscape architect in the first part of the eighteenth century. He was Royal Gardener to George I and George II, designing the gardens at Kensington Palace for them and working for many of the ruling Whig elite, including Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. His landscapes were audacious and monumental, but he is barely known outside the world of academic garden history; most of his gardens have disappeared, changed out of all recognition to chime with later tastes shaped by Lancelot Brown's vision of a more "natural" landscape, or buried under housing developments and golf courses; and there is little archaeological or written evidence of his work.This book aims to redress this injustice and rescue his legacy. It draws on the only significant body of evidence which survived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.vived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.vived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.vived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.lator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837651175
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
An examination of the garden plans of eighteenth-century landscape architect Charles Bridgeman, shedding light on his artistic vision and contributions to English garden history.Charles Bridgeman was a popular and highly successful landscape architect in the first part of the eighteenth century. He was Royal Gardener to George I and George II, designing the gardens at Kensington Palace for them and working for many of the ruling Whig elite, including Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. His landscapes were audacious and monumental, but he is barely known outside the world of academic garden history; most of his gardens have disappeared, changed out of all recognition to chime with later tastes shaped by Lancelot Brown's vision of a more "natural" landscape, or buried under housing developments and golf courses; and there is little archaeological or written evidence of his work.This book aims to redress this injustice and rescue his legacy. It draws on the only significant body of evidence which survived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.vived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.vived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.vived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.lator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.