Creating Arcadia

Creating Arcadia: a gift to the world

The English Landscape Style, developed in 18th-century Georgian Britain, is considered to be the country’s greatest contribution to the visual arts.

Its most famous proponent was Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) but many other landowners and gardeners adopted the English Landscape Style and 'improved' or recreated the landscapes on their great estates in a similar fashion.

Yet the roots of the English Landscape Style lie elsewhere, and deeper in the past than you might expect.

Creating Arcadia: artistic inspiration

The English Landscape Style was inspired by the works of painter Claude Lorrain (1600-1682).

He was born Claude Gellee in the Duchy of Lorraine. Usually considered a French landscape painter, he spent most of his life in Italy. Claude was inspired by earlier Dutch artists and was part of what was called the Roman School.

But how did this European artist have such an impact on British landscapes many years after his death?

Creating Arcadia: The Grand Tour

In the 18th century, rich young men would go on The Grand Tour through Europe to finish their classical education.

Accompanied by a tutor come chaperone, they would visit areas of antiquity, particularly Italy and Greece, as the Roman and Greek world was considered the cradle of civilisation.

They would collect works of art to take home as souvenirs and decorate their houses to show they had done The Grand Tour.

Creating Arcadia: Claude Lorrain paintings

Claude Lorrain paintings were very popular and the rich young men would bring them back from their Grand Tour – they were easier to transport than a statue.

Claude’s paintings contain many elements reproduced by landowners and their master gardeners in the English Landscape Style.

The fashion for these Arcadian landscapes spread amongst landowners who then commissioned further paintings of their new landscapes.

Creating Arcadia: bridges and cascades

A bridge was both a practical way to cross the water as well as an attractive feature in the landscape to enhance the view. Landowners commissioned the top architects to create them alongside their houses.

Creating Arcadia: bridges and cascades

Architectural plans were drawn up for the structures built in the landscapes, and many still survive, giving us an insight into how they were designed and built.

Creating Arcadia: bridges and cascades

Making water behave and look naturalistic required complex and ground breaking engineering, diverting sources of water from elsewhere. It also involved backbreaking work for men, armed only with metal tipped wooden shovels and working with horses and carts. It was an expensive, muddy and time-consuming process

Creating Arcadia: bridges and cascades

Some bridges were actually shams, walls built to hide the end of what looked like a winding river but was really a lake, carefully designed to fool the viewer.

This sham bridge was built at Kenwood House in circa 1767. It was designed by the neoclassical architect and interior designer, Robert Adam.

Creating Arcadia: columns

Trajan's Column in Rome was the ultimate statement of wealth and power. It was much emulated by Georgian landowners if they could afford it. A column had no other purpose than to dominate the landscape that surrounded it.

Creating Arcadia: columns

A column, usually with a huge classical statue atop, demonstrated just how rich and successful its builder was, creating something so expensive and difficult to build for no other reason than to demonstrate that they could.

Creating Arcadia: statues

Repairing a column is still a major undertaking today, even with mechanical cranes doing the heavy lifting, instead of the ropes, pulleys, people and horses, which were the 18th-century equivalent.

Creating Arcadia: castles and ruins

Some landscapes had sham castles or follies – quick and easy to build and quite theatrical in appearance.

Some were very much like theatre backdrops, others were actual buildings which could be used to enjoy the landscape from.

In 1766, Thomas Farr built Blaise Castle folly so that he could climb to the top to watch his ships returning along the River Avon to Bristol. He invested heavily in the slave trade and was bankrupted by the blockade of shipping in the American War of Independence. The Hartford family later bought the estate and campaigned for the abolition of slavery.

Creating Arcadia: castles and ruins

You could call this 'fake news' as the 'history' of the landscape was enhanced to make it, and its owners, appear grander and older than it actually was.

Castles as eye-catchers were popular in remoter and upland areas with rugged landscapes.

Creating Arcadia: castles and ruins

Ruins were part of the Gothic romance so fashionable in the Georgian era. Some very old estates had ruins in situ, from a medieval castle abandoned for the comforts of a more modern house, or the remains of a religious house like Roche Abbey, which was part of the larger Sandbeck Estate.

Originally a Cistercian Abbey for nearly 400 years, it was dismantled following the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII in 1538 and 230 years later Capability Brown remodelled the landscape around the ruins.

Creating Arcadia: castles and ruins

If you didn’t have an existing ruin in your landscape it was possible to import one from elsewhere, such as a part of the Roman ruins from Leptis Magna in Libya on the North African coast, or a full megalith henge of a ‘Druid’s Temple’ transported from the island of Jersey to Berkshire.

However, it was much easier to build your own ruin from scratch.

Creating Arcadia: churches and mausoleums

Churches were often the tallest building in the local landscape, with a tower or spire which made a great ‘eye-catcher’ in the view. But sometimes the church was in the wrong place for that perfect vista.

During the 18th churches were often moved and rebuilt to be part of the landscape scheme, sometimes made to look more like classical temples of the gods of antiquity than the more traditional medieval Christian church it replaced.

Creating Arcadia: churches and mausoleums

The movement of the church was not necessarily convenient for the parishioners, especially if rebuilt at the top of a hill. Often, only the graves of the ‘great and good’ were moved to the new site.

Creating Arcadia: churches and mausoleums

Mausoleums are tombs on a very great scale.

Once again borrowing the idea from classical antiquity, the mausoleum served as a memorial and burial place for the family who owned the estate. Or sometimes their beloved pets.

Placed in the landscape, not within church grounds, mausoleums could be classical in style.

Creating Arcadia: gateways

The gateway might be at the main entrance to an estate, although stand alone gateways were also built within large landscapes as a statement, an eye-catcher and a destination to aim for in your journey around the pleasure grounds.

Creating Arcadia: gateways

Dramatic gateways were borrowed from the classical world where they had been built to celebrate military successes.

The Wellington Arch, also known as Constitution Arch, was built in 1826, at the end of the Georgian period. It was erected to celebrated the British military victories in the Napoleonic Wars, under the command of the Duke of Wellington.

Creating Arcadia: boats and bathhouses

Boating was an obvious activity on a lake, sometimes in a highly decorated pleasure craft. Some lakes played host to spectacular theatrical performances enacted on and around the water.

Creating Arcadia: boats and bathhouses

Fishing was popular, as was swimming (mostly for men). A more discrete way of enjoying your water was in your very own bathhouse.

Creating Arcadia: grottoes

Another popular way to animate the landscape was to create a grotto which could be discovered unexpectedly whilst exploring the grounds.

In classical times a grotto was the cave home of a nymph or water goddess. Grottoes were also very popular in the more thrilling 18th-century novels, so having a grotto surprise showed your guests both your classical education and your up-to-date fashionable reading habits.

Creating Arcadia: grottoes

A grotto could be designed to make visitors feel a bit adventurous, with a partially-concealed dark entrance. Your eyes take a moment to adjust to the darkness and as you move forward you are dazzled by a new light source, illuminating a visual surprise.

This could be a statue of a goddess, or a roof made of crystal rocks, all carefully lit for maximum effect.

Creating Arcadia: grottoes

Grottoes were made of rustic-looking stone. Some were decorated with large and exotic shells, brought to England through the international shipping trade, which supported the growing British economy but fostered the transatlantic slave trade and the East India Company.

Much of the money funding the development of these landscapes had its roots in the exploitation of British colonies and enslaved people.

Creating Arcadia: hermitages

Hermitages were small buildings in the landscape, far way from the hustle and bustle, where it was possible to be a hermit. Most hermitages were used as summer houses in the pleasure grounds.

Creating Arcadia: hermitages

Some estate owners actually tried to employ people to be their resident hermit, but with limited success in most cases. It was easier to install a dummy that didn’t wander off to the local pub... .

Creating Arcadia: ornamental farm buildings

Eighteenth century landscapes were still working agricultural businesses. The landscape needed to produce food, wool and timber to feed people and earn money for the estate.

Creating Arcadia: ornamental farm buildings

Essential farm buildings, often called 'offices' on the plans, were designed to look attractive in the most aesthetically pleasing way and enhance the fantasy of the English landscape style.

Creating Arcadia: ornamental farm buildings

Some estates developed a ferme ornée, an ornamental farm, designed with aesthetic principles but still productive.

Working farm houses, stables and other 'offices' were designed to look attractive yet be practical working buildings.

Creating Arcadia: ha-ha

For a proud landowner, keeping your (sometimes prizewinning) livestock out of your front garden without any ugly fences spoiling your view was no joke. Hence the introduction of the ha-ha.

Creating Arcadia: ha-ha

A ha-ha was a carefully disguised wall and ditch.

Designed to look like a smooth expanse of lawn from the house, it was deep and strong enough to keep sheep, cattle and deer in the fields further away, whilst allowing those in the house to admire them animating the landscape from a distance. Infinity pools aim for the same optical illusion today.