6 - Chiswick

Summary

There are real problems in considering Chiswick as a landscape garden. It was undoubtedly famed and regarded as a formative influence, but when proclaimed as the cradle of the new gardening there should be pause for thought. William Kent certainly introduced a few naturalistic touches, and there were numerous wiggling paths in the best artinatural tradition, but overwhelmingly, then and now, the stand-out, memorable features were and are the formal ones – the exedra, the pattern of goose-foot allées, the Pantheon-like temple in the orange-tree garden, plus the conservatory and the Italian garden (early 19th century). Lord Burlington (1694–1753) was the champion of Palladio, the Italian architect who embraced both classical and Renaissance designs of his own though based on classical forms, and inspired a whole generation of ‘English Palladians’ – but this was to do with architecture. There was therefore a dichotomy between architecture and native garden developments. Lord Burlington, up to the late 1720s, concentrated on creating a quasi-classical garden to complement his iconic villa, based on Palladio though far from being an exact copy. By 1733 there were those who thought that Kent was steering Chiswick in the direction of the new style, but, at the same time as his minor efforts at naturalising, the formal elements continued to be formal. When Burlington died in 1753, Chiswick already seemed old fashioned to some. And by and large it is the geometry that prevails in prints.

This heavily formal garden, partly classical and partly Italian Renaissance in feeling, is represented in the first half of the century by two sets of illustrations, by Pieter Rysbrack (oil paintings, c.1729) and Jacques Rigaud (pen and wash, 1733). Four of the paintings were engraved by Claude Du Bosc and published by Rysbrack in 1734: two are illustrated in Figs 6.1 and 6.2. prepared print studies of all four for Du Bosc, now lost, and that these studies reflected changes in the five years since the original paintings. Kent himself sketched numerous features in the period 1730–35, but it is not always clear whether these were proposals or records of what was already there.