Review of 'The laurel, the palms and the paean' - Gardens of the Aesthetic Movement

One-day Conference

Saturday 30 June 2007

Hestercombe Gardens, Somerset

The Bampfylde Hall, set in the beauty of the summer-flowering gardens at Hestercombe in Somerset, was a fitting venue for a seminal conference on gardens of the Aesthetic Movement held under the auspices of the Institute for Garden & Landscape History. The title of the conference (the quote taken from the late Victorian poet and aesthete Algernon C. Swinburne’s Hymn to Proserpine) defined the context of the day: that the arts should be concerned with beauty and sensual pleasure rather than being purposeful or utilitarian. The ‘Garden Beautiful’, however, has been neglected in scholarly debate and the thesis of the conference was whether the garden, like other art forms, could exist for the sake of beauty or art alone. Organised by the Institute for Garden and Landscape History, the conference was chaired by Professor Timothy Mowl, Director of the Institute, who led a notable line-up of speakers from the UK: Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn and Mr Michael Liversidge (Bristol University), Dr Claire O’Mahony (Kellogg College, Oxford) and Professor Juliet Simpson (Buckingham Chilterns University College); and the USA: Professor Anne Helmreich (Case Western Reserve University) and Dr Morna O’Neill (Yale Centre for British Art).

Prettejohn’s paper provided a stimulating introduction to the Aesthetic Movement in England in the 1860s and ‘70s. Recalling Immanuel Kant’s acknowledgement of landscape gardening as a division of painting in the founding text of modern aesthetics, Critique of Judgement (1790), she firmly set both imaginary gardens of art and literature and the painted gardens of aesthetes in this context. Based on the images of artists such Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederic Leighton and John William Waterhouse, Aesthetic Gardens, she proposed, were characterised by enclosure, flowers, especially roses and tulips (Kant’s ‘free beauties of nature’) and human figures. The transition from the painted garden to the real world, however, was not the result of following an Aesthetic Garden ‘style’, but rather an approach that cut across contemporary gardening styles, such as cottage, natural or formal gardens. It was ‘a garden for delight’ as shown in the paintings of, for example, Frederick Walker and G. D. Leslie, or an ‘old-fashioned’ garden in which ‘flourished abundantly all those productions of Nature which are now banished from our once delighted senses’, as described in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Lothair (1870).

Later speakers expanded and extended many of these issues and, also, emphasised the association between the English Aesthetic Garden and European trends, such as the  Decadent Garden. Simpson’s exposition on the French fin-de-siècle garden and the garden as a museum of nature, based on Pierre Larousse’s definition of gardens as the products of science rather than art, explored in detail the poet Stephan Mallarmé’s symbolic garden at Valvins and the Goncourt brothers’ bourgeois creation at Auteuil, Paris, as musee d’art to complement their eighteenth-century and Japanese art collections in the house. The obsessive climate of enquiry and display demonstrated in this period was further examined by O’Mahony, who focused on the ‘radiant city’ of Nancy, formative in the development of art nouveau through the Ecole de Nancy and designers such as Emile Gallé. Here, as at Auteuil, an Aesthetic Garden was created to complement an art collection, in this case the art nouveau objects of Eugène Corbin. Liversidge turned to Italy for his example of English Aesthetic Movement gardening abroad, describing the Venetian garden made by Sir Frederick and Lady Caroline Eden (interestingly Gertrude Jekyll’s sister) at the turn of the century. Tantalisingly still existing, but inaccessible and neglected behind high walls (on the instructions of its late owner the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hunddertwasser), the original garden on the Giudecca is immortalised in Sir Frederick’s book A Garden in Venice (1903).

The papers by Helmreich and O’Neill, in contrast, were resolutely English in their content, Helmreich initially questioning whether, indeed, the concept of the Aesthetic Garden was a viable one. Delightfully illustrated by Punch cartoons and ‘figureless’ Country Life photographs, she considered how late Victorian and Edwardian gardens can be understood in terms of both ‘Englishness’ and individualism. Concluding that, despite the current lack of a scholarly body of knowledge on the topic, there is no reason why a garden should not exist for the sake of beauty or art alone, she also posed the more practical question: ‘Can a garden transcend the everyday when it needs weeding?’! O’Neill, however, in her examination of the work of the socialist Arts and Crafts artist Walter Crane wondered whether beauty itself could be considered the ‘utilitarian aim’: ‘Gardening is the place where aestheticism and physical labour latch on to each other’. Exploring a previously unexamined aspect of Crane’s work, the garden as an expression of the ideal socialist society, she examined the floral imagery in his paintings and his flower books, in particular references to the socialite Frances Evelyn Maynard, later Countess of Warwick, who supported the socialist cause.

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the architecture and interiors of the Aesthetic Movement and this conference demonstrated that there was also a ‘Garden Beautiful’ that corresponded to the ‘House Beautiful’. The enjoyment and excitement of this day was occasioned not only by the consistently high standard of presentations, but by the fact that this was ‘groundbreaking’ research. We now have a better idea of what the Aesthetic Garden looked like, but this is undoubtedly a fruitful but ‘untrodden’ field for garden history research.

Dr Barbara Simms

Editor, Garden History

The Journal of the Garden History Society.

Picture: Garden of the Corbin mansion, 36-38 rue Sergent Blandan Nancy, with kind permission of the Musée de l'Ecole de Nancy