18th Century Arcadian Landscape.

Please make some noise for a dear friend of mine – Mr Luuuuuuke Moloney! *Insert sound of crowd going wild here!* Luke is an Australian architect currently living and working in London. [Come back Luke – we miss you!]. He is also a super beautiful guy, a loyal friend, a person with depth of character, a bit of a walking encyclopedia, and a friggin’ funny bastard! Basically what I’m saying is that he is a top quality person. I mean, he even got his mum onto Yellowtrace. Seriously, how lovely is that? [Hello Julie!] – x dana

I thought I’d share a guilty pleasure. I’m coming out of the Hepplewhite closet as a lover of the eighteenth century Arcadian landscape. I know, I know – who isn’t?

Here and there, in various corners of Europe, lie landscaped gardens that tie together the strands of a new age in art, architecture, philosophy, and literature.

The age of enlightenment came to a Europe that had laboured under centuries of feudalism, absolutism, war and injustice. A new age, with widened social mobility, education, a growing middle class, and emergent democracies, was at the cusp of existence. How to express this change, this optimism, in design…

For the wealthy, peace in Europe meant that travel routes opened up, and amongst the privileged, a Grand Tour of Europe became de rigeur. Returning from the louche and sunkissed Mediterranean, tourists brought with them tans, tales, and most importantly, at taste for Antiquity. Idealised accounts of Athenian society, and of the bloodier Rome, began to influence social theory and the arts. With the discovery of the ruins at Pompeii, stylistic traits of the ancients became tangible, able to be copied. If the architecture of Athens and Italy was once the backdrop to model societies, could it not do the same again for the modern age?

Top image via wikipedia. Bottom image via argoul.

Poussin’swonderful painting Et In Arcadia Ego points to the presence of death, even in paradise, but it also speaks of a fascination with antiquity, and the pursuit of Arcadia by those able to understand it, dream of it, and perhaps most importantly, afford it. The paintings of Poussin – romantic Italian crags, deftly distributed ruins, a tasteful amount of ruddy peasants tilling the fields – became patternbooks for emerging design.

So it came to pass that the grand estates of Europe began to be made over – the pomposity of the baroque gave way to the sensuality of the antique. The domination of man over nature was let slip, and idealised visions of the natural world became the goal. Architecture and gardens stopped looking like textbooks and started looking like paintings.

Perhaps the hope was that, through the crafting and inhabitation of an ideal landscape, an ideal society would emerge. Perhaps it was just keeping up with the Joneses.

At Prior Park outside Bath, a vast classical mansion and its little bridge, lifted directly from the pages of Palladio, was designed to be visible from the town – ostensibly to enlighten the townsfolk and improve their views, evoke the column-strewn landscapes of Italy, and, I can only assume, flip the bird to the paupers downhill.

The immense mausoleum at Castle Howard – ancient, noble severity for the grand repose of the Earls of Carlisle. The boundaries between the architecture, landscape, and painting of the age begin to blur.

Image via artprojekt.

More Poussin, Attic decrepitude and scenic splendour – keep this in mind for the coming views!

Stourhead – the apotheosis of the Arcadian landscape in England. Temples, brand new ruins, winding paths and everywhere the sense that you are in the hands of lovers of art and architecture.

The maddest, and perhaps most sublime example of all this can be seen just outside Versailles, at Hameau de la Reine –  Marie Antoinette’s pretend farm. Designed by Richard Mique, a painter foremost and architect second, idealised cottages, working mills, hen houses and dairies, are draped like a rustic necklace around a village pond. A glance inside any of these ruinous huts reveals interiors not dissimilar to the magnificent palace at the bottom of the garden – the pursuit of rustic realism was only ever taken so far!

The influence of antiquity of course spread to interiors. The Scottish architect Robert Adam travelled to Rome and upon his return to Britain churned out ravishing neo-Roman interiors for his many clients. At Osterley Park, you can see some of his finest work – I’ve shown the entrance hall and his wonderful Etruscan dressing room – the wallpaper informed by the discoveries being made at Pompeii. The rooms of the house speak of the owner’s desire to demonstrate their intelligence, their au fait disposition with modern ideals, and their appreciation of the finer things.

Something of the flavour of this age lingered into later centuries. The garden at Scotney Castle in Kent has, thanks to a readymade ruin, something of the painterly Poussin landscape to it, though the garden itself dates from the nineteenth century. Already a more rugged version of the natural landscape is allowed to take hold. A wilder, more romantic notion of nature gains acceptance.

But the refinement, beauty, and aspiration of an Arcadian landscape will always do it for me. This is Stourhead again. These places were the trowelled, turfed, and crafted demonstrations of knowledge – cultivated plants for cultivated people. To walk into one of these gardens is not so much to step into another world, as it is to step into a hope for the world, or a vision of how the world might be.

And with thanks to the collapse of the dreadful systems that restricted access to these places to the privileged few, we’re now all allowed to visit – Et in Arcadia Ego? You bet.

–Luke.

[Unless otherwise noted, all photos © Luke Moloney.]