Humphry Repton and the idea of association

Abstract

In 1738, an anonymous visitor to Lord Cobham's Stowe in Buckinghamshire responded to his tour with one of the most illuminating of eighteenth-century descriptions of Stowe's magnificent gardens.1 Among the attractions of his text are its richness of detail and apparent immediacy of response. We seem to see through this visitor's eyes in a fur less consciously mediated way than we do, for example, in William Gilpin's painstakingly staged presentation of a decade later. The anonymous visitor appears to have sought out and registered everything that was there to be seen, including projects under construction, such as the Palladian Bridge, and this lends his account an unusually vivid, participatory quality. Indeed, his progress through the garden appears to have been so purposeful that we may even learn from observations he does not make. It is noteworthy, for example, that the scabrous anti-hermitage known as St Augustine's Cave is not mentioned in 1738, though it is defirutely present in a grove near the Temple of Bacchus by the early 1740s.2 While it is possible that the visitor is manifestmg the same sensitivity as Gilpin, who scrupulously avoids having to describe the interior of the building, I think it is more likely that what we have here is a useful erminus post quem for its hitherto uncertain date of construction.

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