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Groves of Stowe I
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Stowe is synonymous with the history of English landscape gardening. Under the patronage of the Temple-Grenville family what had been a small country park, with Charles Bridgman’s parterres and formal walks illustrated in Rigaud’s engravings, was transformed into a natural and illustrated version of Claude Lorrain’s landscape paintings or the pastoral poems of John Milton and Alexander Pope. Some of the finest names in eighteenth century English architecture and landscape design contributed to Stowe’s fame. The ‘Temples of Delight’ were created by architects such as Sir John Vanbrugh, James Gibbs, William Kent and Robert Adam, while in the garden, Charles Bridgman and ‘Capability’ Brown re-landscaped the parkland. The Horatian concept of ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’ (‘As in Painting so in Poetry’) was never so strongly promoted as in the gardens of Stowe. William Congreve, Alexander Pope and Gilbert West were visitors and wrote lyrically about the gardens and the patronage and political ideologies of their aristocratic creators.
Yet the cut and polished stones of monuments, temples, fountains and follies were created around a core of stucco-covered brick, the neglect of which has taken its physical toll. The Romantic concept of the picturesque, though never really in much vogue at Stowe, was given physical reality through natural decay and ruin as the plantings took over the garden, stone and plaster disintegrated and crumbled and untamed Nature took her course. This is the world evoked in John Piper’s acquatints of Stowe’s ‘pleasing decay’, a vision and interpretation which contrasts with the recent restorations of both Mansion and Gardens by Stowe House Preservation Trust and the National Trust respectively. The theme of the magic of ruin and decay which so appealed to Piper and many other artists, visual and literary, is continued in the fine art photography of Ivan Green. Using layer upon layer of separate images, melded, fused and overlaid into a final image through the artist’s eye and aided by digital technology, the tone and textures of his images are taken from all parts of the Stowe estate. Like their eighteenth century forbears, Stoics and visitors should delight in the meditation and discussion produced by Green’s imaginative inventions, the visual games encouraged from the viewer as he or she seeks to identify a fragment of sculpture, mis-located and juxtaposed with disparate architecture or creeping Nature. Distortion, decay, delight and deception fill these twenty one prints, while Gilbert West’s panegyric text sings from every other page. The photography is neither an illustration nor the poem an inspiration but the two art forms spring from the same source: the celebration of Stowe’s natural and built environment. These images are Green’s twenty-first century homage to Stowe’s landscape, buildings and Temples of Delight.
Crispin Robinson MA, M.Phil
Deputy Head (Academic)
Stowe School
March 2009
Groves of Stowe I
web.mac.com/tinygdynamite/Site_2/Welcome.html
FORWARD
Stowe is synonymous with the history of English landscape gardening. Under the patronage of the Temple-Grenville family what had been a small country park, with Charles Bridgman’s parterres and formal walks illustrated in Rigaud’s engravings, was transformed into a natural and illustrated version of Claude Lorrain’s landscape paintings or the pastoral poems of John Milton and Alexander Pope. Some of the finest names in eighteenth century English architecture and landscape design contributed to Stowe’s fame. The ‘Temples of Delight’ were created by architects such as Sir John Vanbrugh, James Gibbs, William Kent and Robert Adam, while in the garden, Charles Bridgman and ‘Capability’ Brown re-landscaped the parkland. The Horatian concept of ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’ (‘As in Painting so in Poetry’) was never so strongly promoted as in the gardens of Stowe. William Congreve, Alexander Pope and Gilbert West were visitors and wrote lyrically about the gardens and the patronage and political ideologies of their aristocratic creators.
Yet the cut and polished stones of monuments, temples, fountains and follies were created around a core of stucco-covered brick, the neglect of which has taken its physical toll. The Romantic concept of the picturesque, though never really in much vogue at Stowe, was given physical reality through natural decay and ruin as the plantings took over the garden, stone and plaster disintegrated and crumbled and untamed Nature took her course. This is the world evoked in John Piper’s acquatints of Stowe’s ‘pleasing decay’, a vision and interpretation which contrasts with the recent restorations of both Mansion and Gardens by Stowe House Preservation Trust and the National Trust respectively. The theme of the magic of ruin and decay which so appealed to Piper and many other artists, visual and literary, is continued in the fine art photography of Ivan Green. Using layer upon layer of separate images, melded, fused and overlaid into a final image through the artist’s eye and aided by digital technology, the tone and textures of his images are taken from all parts of the Stowe estate. Like their eighteenth century forbears, Stoics and visitors should delight in the meditation and discussion produced by Green’s imaginative inventions, the visual games encouraged from the viewer as he or she seeks to identify a fragment of sculpture, mis-located and juxtaposed with disparate architecture or creeping Nature. Distortion, decay, delight and deception fill these twenty one prints, while Gilbert West’s panegyric text sings from every other page. The photography is neither an illustration nor the poem an inspiration but the two art forms spring from the same source: the celebration of Stowe’s natural and built environment. These images are Green’s twenty-first century homage to Stowe’s landscape, buildings and Temples of Delight.
Crispin Robinson MA, M.Phil
Deputy Head (Academic)
Stowe School
March 2009