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Cover image of The Figure in the Landscape
Cover image of The Figure in the Landscape
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The Figure in the Landscape

Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century

John Dixon Hunt

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Eighteenth-century England saw the rise of a "peculiarly English" art form—landscape gardening—and a corresponding change in attitudes toward the antural world. While the French, who lived under tyranny, had a tightly organized, restrictive gardens, the "free" English enjoyed gardens where they were at liberty to wander. John Dixon Hunt examines eighteenth-century letters, literary and critical works, biographies, paintings, prints, and drawings to trace the gradual movement from formal regularity toward a carefully calculated naturalness.

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Reviews

By means of a thorough reading of selected literary works, John Dixon Hunt traces the rise of the art of gardening in eighteenth-century England from a new point of view, its effect on the human mind... The Figure in the Landscape should hold the attention of any reader interested in the arts and the cultural context of literature.

A handsome and thoroughly readable book

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
288
ISBN
9780801839368
Table of Contents

Preface
Preface to the First Edition
Part I. Green Thoughts and Shades
Chapter 1. Hermits in Their Landscapes
Chapter 2. The Old Hieroglyphic Landscape
Chapter 3. The New Empirical Landscape
Chapter 4

Preface
Preface to the First Edition
Part I. Green Thoughts and Shades
Chapter 1. Hermits in Their Landscapes
Chapter 2. The Old Hieroglyphic Landscape
Chapter 3. The New Empirical Landscape
Chapter 4. Marvell's Gardens
Chapter 5. Gardens of a New Model
Chapter 6. Landschips& Such Wilde Workes
Chapter 7. Borrowed from the Poets
Chapter 8. Tomorrow to Fresh Fields
Part II. Gardening, and Poetry, and Pope
Chapter 9. Scenes for Contemplation
Chapter 10. Artful Wildness to Perplex
Chapter 11. My Structures Rise, My Gardens Grow
Chapter 12. Multiplied Scenes
Chapter 13. Public and Private Virtues
Chapter 14. Professors of Gardening
Part III. The Ingenious and Descriptive Thomson
Chapter 15. The Varied God and Man's Continual Changes
Chapter 16. The Finished Garden
Chapter 17. The Villas Shine
Chapter 18. The Mind's Creative Eye
Chapter 19. The More Enduring Song
Part IV. The Landscape of the Bard
Chapter 20. Wild and British
Chapter 21. Furnishing the Mind's Apartments
Chapter 22. The Gentler Genius of the Plain
Chapter 23. Descriptive and Allegoric
Chapter 24. The Idiom of the Soil
Chapter 25. Night Thoughts
Chapter 26. Can Stow Such Raptures Raise?
Part V. The Landscape of Sensibility
Chapter 27. Landscape Business
Chapter 28. Place-Making
Chapter 29. Prospects for Poetry
Postscript
Notes
Index

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

John Dixon Hunt

John Dixon Hunt is director of the Center for Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks. His many books include The Pre-Raphaelite Imagintion: 1848-1900, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin, and William Kent: Landscape Garden Architect.