Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Hardcover. Black cloth boards with gilt lettering; color-illustrated DJ, with navy, black and white lettering; viii, 182 pp.; richly illustrated. VG (Boards are lightly edgeworn; textblock edges have light smuding/scuffing; interior is clean; binding is solid.) / VG- (DJ is edge/shelfworn, with smudged/scuffed/creasing.). Item #196473
ISBN: 9780750904377
"Parks and gardens in eighteenth-century England are usually seen as works of art created by individual geniuses like William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. But this narrow view wasn't necessarily shared by contemporaries, and Tom Williamson in this thought-provoking book reveals that the aristocracy and gentry, who paid for these private landscapes and lived in them, were motivated by more complex interests and needs." "Landowners had strong ideas of their own about how their property should look and how it should function. The park and garden were part of a working estate consisting of farms and forestry enterprises, and the surroundings of the country house were shaped to suit the requirements of hunting, shooting, riding and other recreational activities as well as to conform to the aesthetic principles of philosophers and landscape gardeners." "Tom Williamson's pioneering study concentrates on the wider social, economic and political implications of these elaborate private landscapes. He emphasizes the practical relationship between the landowners who were demanding customers and the designers who were businessmen as well as artists. In the process he shows how changing fashions in the layout of gentlemen's pleasure grounds were related to broader currents of social and economic development in eighteenth-century England."--Jacket.
OCLC: 32916019
Price: $55.00