1 - Image and propaganda

Summary

It would be impossible to study the English Landscape Garden of the 18th century fully without recourse to the wealth of evidence provided in the form of prints. Although there was no shortage of written accounts to describe gardens at the time, prints were the most forceful way of recording and communicating to a wide audience what a garden looked like, which meant they were accepted as an important medium; but it also gave power to the creators of the print, which might on occasion be some distance from reality. Prints, indeed, tell us as much about the agendas of the garden owner and artist as they do about the gardens being depicted. Reality can suffer in the process, being adjusted or massaged for particular purposes. And those purposes would include ‘spin’, the presentation of an image in what was deemed to be a desirable form, and propaganda.

The sharpness of line encountered in prints may lead to the assumption that they are reliably representational, but that is far from the case. They were the widespread means of recording visually before the advent of photography, but they must not be mistaken for photographs.

Perusal of prints is important in order to understand the thoughts, feelings and concerns of the day as well as to survey the types of garden being made or maintained. They show how gardens were perceived and understood at the time – which may not necessarily be how they have been perceived subsequently. As the whole idea was to sell the maximum number of prints, it was clearly incumbent on the artist to purvey an image that was in tune with the times. Sometimes this would be a matter of portraying (more or less accurately) what was already there, in other words reflecting existing taste, but in other cases features – usually buildings – might be depicted that had not actually been constructed and never would be. And if the garden was an innovative one, as frequently happened in the mid- to later 18th century, it would also be a way of spreading new taste or fashion.