The Garden History Blog

It’s mid-May and my iris have been in bloom and looking magnificent. Not just a few or even a few dozen but several hundred of them, so as you can probably tell from the sheer number I grow, they’re one of my favourite plants. And it’s not just me.

While the American Iris Society’s claim that the Iris is “the Greatest Show in the Floral Kingdom” might be a bit of an exaggeration, it’s not far off because Iris have long captured the human imagination, and today there are many specialist iris nurseries, societies and websites including several specialising in historic varieties.

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In this  my third and final post about 17th and 18thc garden statues I’m turning my attention to John Cheere who was probably the most prolific and arguably the greatest sculptor in lead in Georgian Britain.  His work can be seen in many historic gardens around the country,   and  still commands high prices today if it ever comes to auction.

He trained, alongside his older brother Henry, in the workshops of John Nost II whose story was covered last week. After Nost’s death Henry set up business on his own but in 1739 he and John took the lease on their former boss’s old yard on Piccadilly near  Hyde Park Corner which John was to run for the next 50 years.

Hogarth’s engraving of his yard captures its almost haphazard state, with copies of classical pieces, mixed up with tomb monuments, anatomical drawings and a statue being lifted on a block and tackle ready for transport to a client.

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Following on from last week’s post ….the increasing popularity among the British elite for the Grand Tour from the later 17th century onwards introduced them then to classical statuary and contemporary sculpture  in Italy and France.

On their return they wanted  similar ornaments  for their own gardens. However statues made of carved stone or cast bronze were expensive to produce and instead sculptors began experimenting with using lead.  It was easily worked and highly durable and it was possible to produce multiple copies from the same mould, making it much more profitable.

The result was that  money was no longer the deciding factor and soon it wasn’t just royal and the grandest aristocratic gardens that had their array of classical and rustic figures to ornament their walks and parterres.

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It’s hard to imagine the garden of a grand stately home without a statue or three. Indeed these days even modest gardens like mine have a well placed bust or figure to add a touch of class to the surroundings.  Yet that’s not always been the case.

Statues were a standard part of grand gardens of the classical world but thereafter seem to have disappeared from the garden scene until the Renaissance, and they don’t seem to have made much of an appearance in English gardens until the early 17thc.

It was the Grand Tour that really showed elite Georgian tourists what they were missing, and, on their return from Italy laden down with what the poet Thomas Gray called  “storied urn or animated bust”,  to put in their gardens enabling them  to show off their classical learning.  In the process these statues, columns, urns and other such features  completely changed the character of the English garden.

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Last week’s Funny Faces  were not the only hybrid art form that evolved in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.   Landscape painting was developing too, especially in the Netherlands and artists, such as Arcimboldo whose work I looked at last week didn’t just do “composite heads” they  also played around with landscape and architecture literally giving them human faces and sometimes bodies too [even if the one on the right looks a bit more like a chicken].

If that sounds a bit crazy it  probably is, but it was great fun and the blame for the whole idea may well lie with an architect who wanted to flatter Alexander the Great…

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