The Garden History Blog

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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We’re probably all familiar with  funny faces like these  although I suspect that most of us don’t know much more about them or the artist, except perhaps that his name was Arcimboldo.

The obvious question is why  a serious court artist for three emperors  should turn his hand from conventional portraits to ones  made up entirely of objects such as flowers, fruit and vegetables. It seems such a bizarre thing to do yet,  so what on earth was going through his mind when he painted such pictures, and what was going through the mind of the people who were looking at them?

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Last  week I explored the history of the former royal palace of Eltham, one of the favourite residences of medieval monarchs which  was later almost abandoned and fell into decline before being rediscovered, redesigned  and revitalised in the 1930s by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld.

Today’s post  is going to look at its history after the Courtaulds left in 1944, and in particular how the gardens have been given a new lease of life – dare I say – a second resurrection – over the last 30 years under the guardianship of English Heritage.

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Easter is a difficult time for bloggers, especially if you’re not someone of faith, so having looked at Easter lilies, Easter eggs, even bunnies I was running out  of obvious things to cover.  Of course the central theme of the Christian festival is resurrection so I hope no-one will be offended  if I take that for my theme in a more secular sense.

I took a party of my research students to Eltham Palace recently and at first I thought I’d do a piece about how, like so many other historic  sites Eltham is always on the lookout for ways of making money and bringing in a new audience and how Easter is a good time to do that with  Easter egg trails etc, even though it often impacts badly on the site.

 

Then I had a brainwave, and it  wasn’t  to do with these Easter events but instead it was about the resurrection of this  former mediaeval royal palace and its gardens, not once but twice in less than a hundred years.

 

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