Prophet with honor: The career of Andrew Jackson Downing 1815–1852 and Pleasure Grounds: Andrew Jackson Downing and Montgomery Place/with illustrations by Alexander Jackson Davis

Abstract

The appearance of two books on Andrew Jackson Downing is cause for celebration. There has been a curious scarcity of scholarly enquiry into the work of this pre-eminent nineteenth-century American figure: horticulturist, landscape gardener and architectural critic, author of the enormously popular Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841), Cottage Residences (1842), Fruits and Fruit- Trees of America (1845), and Architecture of Country Houses (1850), and editor of the monthly journal The Horticulturist from July 1846 until his death in July 1852. George B. Tatum and his seven contributors have begun to address this need in Prophet With Honor, a collection of papers from the 1987 symposium organized jointly by The Athenaeum of Philadelphia and Dumbarton Oaks. Another recent publication Pleasure Grounds offers transcriptions of ten letters by Downing to the owners of Montgomery Place, a reprint of the editorial in The Horticulturist chronicling the charms of this Hudson River country seat, and finally A. J. Davis's sketches of the estate.