Emblem and Expressionism in the Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden

Abstract

THE PROGRESS OF landscape gardening in the eighteenth century is, as everyone knows, closely connected with literary history. Their relationship is celebrated in Horace Walpole's apophthegm: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the Science of Landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn nature.I Their cooperation certainly established a new style of landscape gardening. But what is rarely recognized are the consequences for the sisters themselves of their joint enterprise. The fresh ideas they promoted were subject to modification and revision and one particular development-that from emblematic to expressive gardening-determined parallel movements in literary history. It will be useful to begin with a late and retrospective account of the history of landscape taste, because it probably offers a clearer, sharper version of certain changes than ever, of course, actually occurred in a park or garden. In 1770 Thomas Whately published his Observations on Modern Gardening; at the center of his thinking about landscape is the distinction he makes between the emblematic and expressive character of a garden:

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