5 - Stowe

Summary

The most famous garden in Britain in the 18th century was Stowe, near Buckingham. It was frequently visited and more talked and written about than any other, and also more often depicted than gardens elsewhere. One can read the development of the layout from a few paintings and sketches and a large number of visitor accounts in prose and verse, but to understand the appearance of the gardens and what they express, together with how they were perceived and how tastes changed, one needs to consult the substantial body of prints that covered the span of Stowe's glory days. Not only did prints do most to spread the fame of the gardens and information about them in such forms as the successive (and pioneering) series of guidebooks, but they led to Stowe being considered the peak of the landscape garden on the Continent. Georges Le Rouge, mentioned in Chapter 3, presented some prints of Stowe in his cahiers, printed as usual in reverse, in a desperate attempt to ‘prove’ that it was Chinese in flavour. As for Catherine the Great, when she ordered the celebrated ‘Green Frog’ dinner service from Wedgwood, there were 48 views of Stowe illustrated, nearly twice the number of its nearest rival, Kew. Most were taken from prints by George Bickham Jr after artwork by Chatelain, representing the gardens in 1752. The Green Frog images would have been supplemented by accounts from the Neyelovs, father and son, architects who came to England in 1771. They would have reported back to Catherine, clutching one or more Stowe guidebooks which portrayed a wide range of buildings and other features, several of which inspired the empress to stamp her own mark on them and ‘Russianise’ the structures.

But the huge fame and popularity of Stowe abroad create a problem if we wish to consider it as the premier landscape garden. It was structured and laid out in the early part of the century along formal, baroque lines: perhaps one should call it an Augustan garden, since the references were mainly classical, albeit with some Renaissance and modern features to add variety. The simple, restricted layout of three terraces near the house c.17002 gave way to a grand French formality and thence to an enormous landscaped park that contained the famous gardens.