By Tom Duncan
To be held in Malpas Village Hall (transport arranged from Boscawen Park)
Eighteenth century England produced a remarkable number of classical Landscape Gardens that have survived such as Stowe, Rousham and Stourhead.
Throughout the century garden designers such as William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton reshaped many aristocratic parks replacing formal Baroque schemes with varying approaches to the creation of a more relaxed and natural look.
Behind much of this landscape design lies the influence of paintings, especially paintings in which an ideal world existed, inspired by the poetry of Virgil.
Seventeenth century painters in Rome such as Poussin and Claude created this world on canvas and Englishmen on the Grand Tour found them irresistibly attractive. So much so that not only did they buy these paintings to take home, they had real landscapes created in the English countryside which would allow them to have their own version of this Arcadian world literally on their doorsteps.
Stowe, photo (c) National Trust
As the century moved towards its close this classical vision came to be challenged by a wilder, more romantic notion of what landscape should be.
The “classical” picturesque gave way to the natural landscape as described in the writings of Richard Payne Knight and others. This was also the period when more natural landscapes came to be painted by Constable and the many new devotees of watercolour painting.
About the Lecturer
Tom Duncan was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied History of Art and Ancient History & Classical Archaeology. He then studied for his Masters in the United States, and moved to England in 1984 to complete his Ph. D. He has lectured widely to heritage and artistic organisations, nationally and internationally for many years.
We do hope you will be able to join us on
Thursday 11th November 2021 10.30am-3.30pm
Cost £30 per person to include coffee and cake
Optional Buffet Lunch £5.00
Please click here link for a booking form