California Landscapes

I learned about California landscape painter, William Keith (1838 – 1911), while on the Artists and Architects tour at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. According to Michael Colbruno, in his blog post “William Keith, Painter & Mary McHenry Keith, Suffragette & Legal Pioneer”, Keith was born in Scotland and moved to San Francisco in 1859. He became a leading and prosperous landscape artist, and lifelong friend of John Muir, who shared his love of the California landscape. He married Mary McHenry Keith (1855-1947), who was the first female graduate of Hastings Law School and a prominent suffragette.

William Keith Gallery

About two thousand of Keith’s paintings were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, but a good collection is now housed in the Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art. A small collection of paintings is displayed on a rotating basis, and the complete collection is posted online. Keith painted people and places all over California and the San Francisco Bay Area, and even painted a couple of landscapes in Southeast Alaska (see 1886 - 1892).

William Keith, Oak Forest With Three Figures, 1906-1911

My husband and I spent a pleasant afternoon earlier this year, driving out to Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, and viewing the current pieces on display. They reminded me of the Italian landscape paintings that inspired the Landscape Movement in the 1600s and 1700s, but with California vegetation and geology. The paintings capture the California landscape of a bygone era, before so much growth and development. Afterward we stopped at Bianca’s Deli for sandwiches and conversation, surrounded by students from Saint Mary’s College.



William Keith, Glacial Meadow and Lake, High Sierra (Tuolumne Meadows), 1870s or early 1880s

Stourhead

According to Penelope Hobhouse, writing in The Story of Gardening, the landscape garden’s grassy meadows, serpentine lakes, gently contoured hills, and artfully arranged clumps of trees seem the very model of Englishness, and almost “indistinguishable from the ‘real’ countryside.” Indeed, the great English landscape gardens and parks that remain today—such as Stowe, Stourhead, and many others—do resemble natural countryside.

Stourhead in Wiltshire, England is a prime example of an eighteenth century garden inspired by landscape paintings. Henry Hoare I (1705 - 85) designed the landscape and worked on it from 1745 to 73. He was inspired by landscape paintings, and by Vergil’s epic poem Aeneid (Book III), which tells of the journey of Aeneas, Rome’s founder. Hoare created a lake, and developed a peripheral walk in which “incidents” are revealed from the poem. As one walks around the lake, views of nature and eye catchers appear across the lake, invoking scenes from the poem.

Stourhead Bridge with the Pantheon in the distance (Photo by Lechona)

The eye catchers are both classical and gothic—a temple, a grotto, a pantheon, a bridge, an abbey, and so forth. The surrounding landscape includes a dense wood of dark conifers from northwest America, and a collection of rhododendrons and laurels. Christopher Thacker observes in The History of Gardens, that the design remains little changed, except for the addition of ornamental and exotic trees and shrubs in the nineteenth century. A visitor to Stourhead today sees a mature landscape that resembles natural country side.

Elements of the Landscape Movement

During the landscape movement, the highly manicured, formal gardens of the Renaissance softened into more naturalistic gardens. This was an evolutionary process, that occurred over the course of one hundred years, yet several basic design elements emerged.

Temple of Ancient Virtue at Stowe Landscape Gardens in Buckingham, England (photo by mym)

Penelope Hobhouse (The Story of Gardening) and Christopher Thacker (The History of Gardens) identify these basic design elements:

• House-to-borrowed view – the garden flowed seamlessly and uninterrupted from the house to the distant landscape. Landscapers went to great lengths to create these living pictures, sometimes moving whole villages, creating lakes, or excavating hillsides.
• The Ha-ha – a sunken wall and ditch created a kind of inverted fence, for keeping grazing animals and wild creatures out of the garden, but in the landscape picture. This enabled the area around the house, the park, and the distant country side to become one sweeping vista.
• Serpentine lines – the rigid lines of the Renaissance and formal gardens softened. Serpentine lakes and curving streams replaced geometric fountains and ponds. Contoured land masses and natural looking valleys that emulated nature became the ideal.
• Trees and plants – forests and copse of trees silhouetted against the sky replaced the topiary of the formal garden. Shrubs, meadows and lawns replaced flower gardens and flower beds. The shrubs and trees coming from the Americas were sought after and integrated into the landscape.
• The Eye Catcher – architectural or natural objects that created a focal point were integrated into the landscape. Temples, obelisks, bridges, pagodas, grottos, and ruins were used, often marking stages in a circuit walk. As the viewer followed a winding path or road, these eye catchers were revealed. Sometimes the objects told a story, like the political commentary of Stowe gardens in Buckingham; or represented a classical ideal, like the Stourhead gardens in Wiltshire, England.

The Grotto at Painshill Park in Surrey, England (photo by Amandajm)

 

These elements worked together to form a landscape that appeared as though it was simply part of nature. The landscapes were replicas of the ideal, and often indistinguishable from nature itself.

Garden History – Landscape Movement

Back to Europe for more garden history (recall when last in Europe, we studied Renaissance and formal gardens of the seventeenth century, both on the continent and in England). Fast forward to the eighteenth century, and to the emergence of the landscape movement. For sources, I’m using The History of Gardens, by Christopher Thacker, and The Story of Gardening, by Penelope Hobhouse.

Gardeners in England adopted some elements of the Renaissance and formal gardens, but they resisted full scale adoption. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, authors began to question the tightly clipped and manicured formal gardens, and to rediscover classical Roman ideas, which emphasized nature and retreat to bucolic country life. They were intrigued by the writings of Father Matteo Ripa (1682 – 1746), who described the gardens he observed during his 13 years in China; and were inspired by paintings of the Italian countryside by artists such as Nicolas Poussin (1594 – 1665) and Claude Lorraine (1600 – 1682).

In 1719, the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) wrote to a friend “when laying out a garden, one should consider the genius of the place”; and in a poem described “all gardening is landscape painting…just like a landscape hung up”. They were also entranced with plant discoveries that were pouring in from the Americas, and from all over the world.

Pastoral Landscape, by Claude Lorrain (1648)

From these influences, a new garden style emerged. The landscape movement did not take hold at once, it was influenced by several generations of gardeners, each improving on the work of predecessors. Hobhouse identifies three main phases:

• Phase 1 (1720 - 1740s): Charles Bridgeman and William Kent (influenced by Pope), mixed formal and informal styles, provided views to the country side, and incorporated temples, pavilions and various buildings in the garden design.
• Phase 2 (1750 – 1780s): Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and his followers created landscapes that emulated nature. The green garden flowed uninterrupted from the house to the distant landscape. The garden was often indistinguishable from nature (nature was “edited” to achieve this).
• Phase 3 (1780 – 1810s): critics of the tame garden parks called for a wilder, more naturalist approach. They designed landscapes that incorporated beauty (elements that are smooth, regular, delicate, and harmonious), and the sublime (elements that also move us aesthetically, but are rough, gloomy, violent, and gigantic, such a volcanoes, storms, cataracts, and primitive beauty). As Hobhouse  describes “genuine romantic wildness typified by asymmetry, distant moors or mountains, rushing torrents, and crumbling ruins”.

Under these influences, the English landscape garden became indistinguishable from the real country side.