I wrote a few months ago about William Gilpin who was in the words of the Monthly Review in April 1799, “the venerable founder and master of the picturesque school.” The problem was that while his travel writings and books about aesthetic theories helped define “picturesque beauty” there’s little doubt that he was more than a bit pompous and self-opinionated, and so very easy to satirise.
There was no better deflater of the self-important than the cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson. He apparently told a group of friends that he had decided on a tour of his own to the West Country and he felt “in a humour to sketch a series, where the object may be made ridiculous without much thinking.” Gilpin was an easy target and by 1809 Rowlandson had invented the character of Dr Syntax.
Like Gilpin, Syntax is a clergyman, artist and schoolmaster who travelled to out-of-the way places, drawing and describing them for publication. The result was humour that parodied Gilpin not cruelly but comically, in ways that can still make us laugh today.
These days there’s only one famous Mrs Richmond – my friend the media star Advolly – but I hate to tell her she has, or at least had, a rival!
A little way along the Thames from Marble Hill which I wrote about last week is perhaps the most important of those 18th century riverside sites: the last remaining part of the villa, grotto and garden built on the banks of the Thames by the poet Alexander Pope in the 1720s.
The Garden History Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.