Catalogue Of The Celebrated Collection Of Pictures Porcelain Objects Of Art And Decorative Furniture Of Mrs Lyne Stephens Deceased Removed From Lynford Hall Norfolk Upper Grove House Roehampton And From Paris

Author : Tom Williamson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (318 download)

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Download or read book Polite Landscapes written by Tom Williamson and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.