William Shenstone and the Leasowes
The English landscape garden in transition, c.1740-1763

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

[start page 49] In Richard Graves’s novel Columella (1779) the figure of the title, an affectionate parody of William Shenstone, leads a party of visiting friends around his grounds until they come to ‘a beautiful stone urn’,

in a gloomy recess formed by a circle of spreading beeches, on whose pedestal was inscribed ‘GENIO LOCI;’ in allusion to that awful idea which poets and persons of warm imaginations have always been impressed, of some supernatural and invisible Being which inhabits and presides over woods and solitudes; and as expressive of that pleasure which we receive from the beauties of Nature.[1]

At the Leasowes can be found a consistent and considered effort to respond to the Genius of the Place, but to do so through the exploitation of the human mind as an actively involved mediating principle between the natural landscape, the application of art to improve it, and the particular ideological/sentimental conception of the garden which those improvements are intended to create and sustain. Thus, the streams must be populated with naiads, the woods with fauns, pastures must be under the protection of Pan and the lonely groves must invoke the spirits of departed friends. Even the Genius of the Place is conceived of, not as the embodiment of the passive ‘capabilities’ of the landscape, nor as an artist who ‘paints as you plant, as you work, designs’, but as a spiritual force to be invoked through the creation of a particular mood.

The English landscape garden, like other art forms, can be said to have been constantly in transition; even the ‘culmination’ of the natural style in Capability Brown’s parks can be seen as a transitional stage between two periods of more emblematic gardening, in the first half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. Yet the Leasowes does mark a significant point of transition for the English landscape garden in two ways. In the first place, it can be seen as a classic example of the ‘intermediate garden’[2] which developed in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, incorporating the emblematic, symbolic elements inherited from the Italian renaissance garden, but looking forward in its determination to alter the balance between art and nature in favour of the latter, to the formalist parklands of Brown and his followers. Secondly, it marks the fullest and most self-conscious attempt to realize the ferme ornée ideal in England. The ferme ornée was itself a traditional form of garden which, in its most idealized form, dispensed with ‘gardening’ altogether in the name of the most [end page 49] natural way of bringing human management and improvement to the landscape and reconciling human activities with a perceived ‘naturalness’ in landscape. That idea of ‘natural’ landscape was itself a human construction, and not the least illuminating aspect of Shenstone’s garden is that he accepted the artificiality of ‘nature’. He saw in nature a medium with which to work, rather than a given ideal to which he had to aspire.

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© Ralph Harrington 1994 and 2006. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

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To cite print version: Ralph Harrington, William Shenstone and the Leasowes: The English Landscape Garden in Transition, c.1740-1763 (unpub. M.St. thesis, University of Oxford, 1994)
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Notes

1. Richard Graves, Columella, or, the Distressed Anchoret(3 vols., London, 1779), vol. I, p. 130.

2. Paulson, Emblem and Expression, p. 20.