I was tidying up my treasure trove of old magazines when I was distracted by the colourful  image above of an elaborate swing seat under a chinoiserie shelter. It headed an article by Michael Huey called “Garden Variety” in The World of Interiors in August 2024,  all about the eccentric Magazine of Ideas for Lovers of Gardens so of course  I just had to go and find out more about it so I could try and convince my partner to build one for me.

Since the first proper gardening magazines were published in the first half of the 19thc, right through to contemporary  glossy coffee table magazines, most garden lovers enjoy flicking through checking  out new ideas for their gardens. It’s the literary equivalent of peering over a garden wall or visiting a garden that’s open for the NGS. You never know what ideas you could find, adapt and maybe even use in your own patch.

But it turns out there aren’t many garden magazines quite like this one

 

Unless otherwise acknowledged, all the images come from the magazine and you can find links to them at the end of the post

I didn’t put the full name of the Ideas magazine  in the opening paragraph quite deliberately, because I suspect that most of you would have taken one look and stopped reading.  Please don’t do that even when you realise it was  Ideenmagazin für Liebhaber von Gärten, Englischen Anlagen und für Besitzer von Landgütern which trasnalates as (Magazine of Ideas for Lovers of Gardens, English Landscape Parks and Country Estates).  It was published in Leipzig between 1796 and 1802 (with a later version later continuing until about 1804–06). At that point Saxony became involved in the Napoleonic Wars and publication stopped, although there was a short-lived  successor once the conflict was over.

It isn’t really what anyone today would recognise as a magazine because in every issue behinds its dull cover were just 10 plates and accompanying short descriptive notes which formed  the only text.  The engravings were designs for garden buildings and  features of all kinds from bridges, urns and hermitages to pavilions, fencing and entrance gates. They came in every style fashionable at the time: classical,  rustic, Gothic and Chinoiserie but in the earliest issues they were almost all  described as “English.”

I didn’t think I’d get very far with reading it because my German is virtually non-existent but,  to my surprise.  the accompanying notes to the illustrations were  bilingual in German/French.  Given that it was claimed to be for lovers of English gardens, landscape parks and country estates it turns out the magazine was properly international. It was available through  exclusive agents who advertised the work, accepted subscriptions, and distributed copies  in their respective countries. These included John Boosey in London, and others in Paris, Strasbourg, The Hague  St. Petersburg, Moscow and Budapest. This was a remarkably distribution network for the period especially considering this was the time when most of Western Europe was engulfed by the Napoleonic Wars.

The editor was a young German academic Johann Gottfried Grohmann who was only 31 when he was appointed professor of philosophy [a wide term covering almost all the arts] at Leipzig University and began writing. books on subjects ranging from  ancient Egyptian architecture and aesthetics to outdoor sports and games.   His collaborator was Adam Baumgärtner,  probably the leading German publishers of illustrated books during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

 

 

In the Preface to the first volume, Grohmann wrote  “Since the prosperous and wealthy classes of cultivated nations now find pleasure in country life and in agriculture and gardening, and strive in friendly rivalry to embellish and improve their estates as much as possible, it is our wish to assist, so far as lies within our power, the noble intentions of everyone engaged in such undertakings.  Accordingly, in our successive issues we shall present the choicest designs for garden houses, pavilions, temples, cottages, farmsteads, hermitages, grottoes, promenades, plantations, ruins, monuments and tombs, resting places, bridges, islands, cascades, and many other features, thereby providing our readers with ample material from which to make their own selections.”

It’s worth pointing out that at this point that English taste in gardens and especially landscape design was extremely fashionable across all of Western Europe  and what Grohmann and Baumgärtner were aiming to do was cash in on that. Nevertheless I thought how adventurous they were being creating and putting together a collection of English designs for a continental audience but as I flicked through the first few issues alarm bells started ringing in my head.

Several things looked familiar and I realised that Grohmann and Baumgärtner were probably not inventing many [if any] of these designs themselves. Rather, when they launched the magazine, they boasted that “we receive the originals from London.”

After I looked through more  issues the penny started to drop,  what they were doing was little less than piracy.  They were obtaining original books, magazines and occasionally  some loose prints and engravings,  and simply getting them copied  or occasionally adapting them.  That wasn’t that difficult to do in the days because there was no such thing as international copyright.  [That didn’t start until the Berne Convention of 1886].    So I now wondered who was supplying them and with what?  Given that John Boosey was their agent in London I thought initially it was probably through him. However Boosey was not a major publisher but a bookseller and instead I think it was Britain’s leading architectural publishers run by Isaac  and later  Josiah Taylor. Isaac had been  an engraver who in 1770 took over the publishing and bookselling business where he worked. He was later joined by his son Josiah and they built a flourishing business, establishing a virtual monopoly of architectural publications which ran until Josiah’s death in 1834.

The Taylors  regularly published  a catalogue of their Architectural Library which included books like those of Batty Langley published as much as 50 years earlier  right up to the latest offerings. and included it at the back of  all the books they published.

A quick check showed that the catalogue had been available through bookselling agents in many European cities, – including Leipzig -and the catalogue is held  in major continental libraries or archives.  All that made it a good place to start trying to track down where the German pirates were getting their imagery.

It helped that it was during the worst of the heat waves, so while it 40C+ outside I could sit at my desk looking through 18th century garden-related books.

At first I thought it would quick and easy – I knew lots of the English books reasonably well and recognised the style if not the exact image as I glanced through, However there are about 500 plates in the magazine, many having several unrelated images on the same page, so my brain soon ran out of storage space. After a while too one gothic temple, Chinese bridge, or rustic cottage looks like 20 others and so I had to have a rethink and decided to concentrate my efforts on the first dozen issues and a few main categories of illustration.  As it happens I struck lucky early on  because for several months I’ve been planning a post about a relatively little-known architect named John Plaw and I could see several plates in his style, notably from the  book that was advertised at the top of the first page of  the 1793 catalogue above.

Plaw was a Londoner, born in 1745 and apprenticed  at 13 to a member of the Tylers’ and Bricklayers’ Company in London.  Five years later he was already being described as an ‘architect and master builder in Westminster‘ – not a bad start to his career.  He was later to take on pupils of his own, the most notable being John Buonarotti Papworth. who was the subject of an earlier post.  Most of Plaw’s commissions were for villas, cottages and farm buildings around the capital or within easy reach.

These included  the Round House at Havering  which featured in an earlier post as  home to Florence and Joseph Pemberton, the rose breeders.Another was New York Cottage, Throwley, Kent, now listed at Grade II.

Unfortunately few  of these less grand buildings survive, at least identifiably.

There were a few exceptions which show the wider range of which he was capable.  Perhaps his  most well-known surviving commission  is  Belle Isle on an island in Lake Windermere.  Built in 1774-75  it’s a domed, circular villa with an Ionic portico rather like a miniature version of  the Pantheon in Rome. Plaw published his own illustration of the house in his Rural Architecture 

 

Interestingly the Earl Bishop of Bristol whose later, much grander, rotunda at Ickworth is  in the same style  was apparently open in his admiration for Plaw’s design for Belle Isle.

Plaw also designed  St Mary’s church, Paddington Green, a classically-inspired design in the form of a Greek cross and is thought to be the architect for Houghton Lodge  the UK’s best surviving example of an 18th century “cottage orné” which was built as a country fishing lodge  in Hampshire  in 1790.

In 1795 he was lured from London to Southampton to design  military barracks which were a major source of employment for jobbing architects given the almost continual wars and threats of invasion . However around 1809, apparently “discouraged and disappointed in his art … which he loved and laboured to promote‘” he emigrated to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.  His departure is equally likely to have been because he was seriously in debt.He left behind a string of creditors and was declared bankrupt in absentia in December that year.  However he was fortunate enough to be able to set  up practice  in Charlottetown where he eventually died and is buried in 1822.

There is a detailed article about his work there on the Prince Edward Island Blog.  For more on his work in Southampton see this article on Sotonopedia.

 

 

Plaw used his designs – both completed and planned – to publish three books:  Rural Architecture (1785) Ferme ornée, or, Rural Improvements (1795) and Sketches for Country Houses, Villas and Rural Dwellings (1800). These were aimed as the title page of the Sketches puts it, at ‘persons of moderate income‘ and were  illustrated with   aquatinted engravings—the first time the technique was used in  English architectural publishing.  Most of his buildings  had what  he called ‘symmetry and correspondence of parts‘ although as you can see  this did not mean he couldn’t be adventurous because several of them were circular, oval or even triangular in plan while others had turrets or  towers.

 

 

Overall these all generally fitted neatly into the newly fashionable  taste for the picturesque and he employed – in his images at least –  lots of  vernacular rustic materials such as tree trunks and thatch and often crude Gothic detailing. All of this would have stood him in good stead with both his London publisher, Taylors, and his German counterparts.

Plaw’s Ferme ornée formed a good starting point for tracing the English origins of the magazines images.  It didn’t take much of effort to cross check the plates with those in the early issues of the magazine.  There are 38 plates and about half of them were “borrowed'”.  Next I wondered how the copies were done. Since the Germans didn’t have modern technology or access to the original printers plates it meant that someone had to sit down and redraw, engrave and even shade or tint to get a passable copy- even though their international  readership wouldn’t have known the details of the original anyway.  Maybe it was just a matter of pride because of often, as in the plate above, the quality of the fine detailing is much better.

I then worked my way methodically through the rest of the books in Taylor’ catalogue and gradually things fell into place.  Grohmann and Baumgartner obviously obtained many of the titles but rather than do wholesale copying as they did with Plaw, they picked a few plates from a range of  books, jumbled them up and spread them out over different issues. It made a strange mixture and I can’t really see what readers would have got out of it but then I discovered that gardens were not the only subject area where they tried a similar approach, nor was it their only garden-related magazine.  They published Ideen-Magazin für Architecten, Künstler und Handwerker – “Idea Magazine for Architects, Artists, and Artisans”  in English, and then Recueil de dessins d’une execution peu dispendieuse or A collection of low-cost designs.

 

Not all the copies were exact. Sometimes they were mirror images as in the case of the one on the left which they took the design from  a book of rustic furniture designs thought perhaps to be by William Wrighte, although there’s no real evidence to back that claim.

Others including the mirror and table in the image above were a composite of elements from two or even more plates.

 

From Nicholas Wallis’s The Carpenter’s Treasure of 1773 came, amongst things,  this assemblage of garden gates and railings, and these  bridges in the Gothic and Chinese styles

A Mauresque Temple came from William Wrighte’s Grotesque Architecture

while William Chambers Description of Kew yielded The Temple of Aeolus

and  an obelisk came from Sir John Soane’s 1790 Designs in Architecture although it only formed part of the plate and had to share the page with a rather strange windmill!

And finally [for today] they pirated a print of Esher Place but issued it as a reverse of the original

But that has left most of the other images on this post and quite a flot more in the magazine unaccounted for so please don’t miss next week’s post when more will be explained…

The easiest way to access the magazine is via the following links.  It’s on the website of Heidelberg University but the pages have an English language option.  The first six issues [In German Hefts 1-6] ,followed by  Issues 7-12 [Heft 7-12] and if you want to go and see even more issues then, when you have a page open, click on All Related Items in the top left corner. The magazine is also available on Biodiversity Heritage Library but be warned the ordering of the issues is different because the publishers re-issued the magazine several times.

Esher Place, the Seat of Miss Frances Pelham, by Medland after Meheux, 1792