TITLE: LORD BURLINGTON AND HIS CIRCLE.
ABSTRACT: ‘Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, is important to the story of Stourhead in a number of ways’. Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity, p.8.
The identity of the architect of most of the garden buildings at Stourhead takes us straight back to the early days at Chiswick. Henry Flitcroft was Lord Burlington’s draughtsman throughout the 1720s and was involved in designs for garden buildings as well as the villa. In a long career, Flitcroft designed many garden buildings, but whilst the ‘templescape’ of Stourhead might superficially appear to be a successor to Chiswick and William Kent’s gardens elsewhere, the spirit of the gardens in question had altered considerably. Burlington’s self-consciously antique gardens at Chiswick were theoretical and intellectual. Kent’s gardens were in a ‘rural’ manner, initially accompaniments to his Gothick buildings and cascades. Alexander Pope and Philip Southcote developed the analogy of garden design to the rules of landscape painting. Lancelot Brown’s parks were expressions of a conception of Nature that was both pure and simple. This paper will explain Lord Burlington’s aims in garden design in the 1720s, and contrast them to Hoare’s aims at Stourhead in the 1750s, in the process differentiating some of the phases of the templescape tradition over the intervening generation.
BIOGRAPHY: Dr David Jacques is a trustee of Chiswick House and Gardens and has recently completed a book on the development of the gardens, including a detailed and revealing examination of Burlington’s and Kent’s alterations. He spoke on the sources of Kent’s ideas on gardens at the conference on William Kent at Bard College, New York, in 2012, and his paper has been submitted to Garden History.