We picked up our copy of Humphry Repton; Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England by Stephen Daniels in order to reintroduce ourselves to his vast number (400 during a thirty-year career) of landscape commissions. New York's Morgan Library and Museum is presenting Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art and Landscape Design, an exhibition that demonstrates how the Romantic Movement in literature influenced the style of landscape design in England, France, Germany, and the United States.
The Morgan site notes that: The Romantics looked to nature as a liberating force, a source of sensual pleasure, moral instruction, religious insight, and artistic inspiration. Eloquent exponents of these ideals, they extolled the mystical powers of nature and argued for more sympathetic styles of garden design in books, manuscripts, and drawings, now regarded as core documents of the Romantic Movement. Their cult of inner beauty and their view of the outside world dominated European thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The exhibition features approximately ninety highly influential texts and outstanding works of art, providing a compelling overview of ideas championed by the Romantics and also implemented by them in private estates and public parks in Europe and the United States, notably New York's Central Park.
Also on view are two manuscript 'Red Books' by Humphry Repton (1752–1818), the leading landscape architect of his time and author of theoretical treatises greatly admired by Pückler and other European connoisseurs. In these publications and the Red Books (known for their characteristic red bindings), Repton developed a technique of showing before-and-after views of picturesque scenery so that his readers and clients could see at a glance what he expected to accomplish.
Repton's biographer Daniels also was the author of a Gothic Gallantry: Humphry Repton, Lord Byron and the Sexual Politics of Landscape Gardening, from which we're quoting:
"If Humphry Repton assumed Capability Brown’s mantle, he was less a Man of Business than a Man of Fashion. The failure of his first career as a textile merchant in Norwich seems to be partly due to his taste for wearing fine fabrics rather than trading them, his distaste for the counting house, and his love of fashionable homes and assemblies in the city, where he performed with his 'fine voice and sweet toned flute.' 'Every article of my dress was most assiduously studied; and while I can now smile with contempt on the singular hat, or odd-shaped pantaloons of some dandy of the present day, I recall to my mind the white coat, lined with blue stain, and trimmed with silver fringe, in which I was supposed to captivate all hearts on one memorable occasion.' These 'feelings of youthful vanity became sobered down by an ardent and loving attachment' to Mary Clarke, his future wife, notes Repton’s first biographer. But, as I have shown in my recent book on Repton, he was highly fashion conscious throughout his career and was to be found at venues where he could see and be seen by the beau monde at theaters, concerts, masquerades, and country house parties of the high society, whose company he craved rather more than their business."
But back to Stephen Daniels' biography of Repton: In advance of his death, he described his projected burial location: a plot against the south wall of Aylsham parish church. He explained, in a letter to the vicar that he was standing
"on the spot during a gleam of sunshine last October when I often enjoyed the thought of converting a weedy corner into a beautiful Flower Garden, and gathering a barren ear of wild barley I promised it would be a rose. After twenty years of War which abridged me of many comforts I am now happy that I shall depart in Peace to sleep near the Ashes of my Parents, and have desired that mine may be so slightly enclosed as soon to dissolve and form part of the Garden mold of my warm, snug corner where I will soon be converted into the pabulum of Roses."
One of the events scheduled during the run of the Morgan exhibit will be a showing of the movie version of The Secret Garden. Of course, you can always rent, borrow or purchase your copy of the 1994 film or read the book by Frances Hodges Burnett.
