Rousham inside and out

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Notes

1. A bibliography is given by Ulrich Müller, Klassischer Geschmack und gotische Tugend. Der englische Landsitz Rousham (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998).

2. On Kent see in particular the following monographs: Margaret Jourdain, The Work of William Kent. Artist, Painter, Designer and Landscape Gardener (London: Country Life Ltd., 1948); Michael Wilson, William Kent. Architect, Designer, Painter, Gardener, 1685–1748 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); John Wilton‐Ely (ed.), A Tercentenary Tribute to William Kent. Born Bridlington 1685, died 1748, Architect, Landscape, Furniture & Interior Designer, Painter & Book Illustrator (Kingston upon Hull: Ferens Art Gallery, 1985); John Dixon Hunt, William Kent, Landscape Garden Designer. An Assessment and Catalogue of his Designs (London: Zwemmer, 1987); Timothy Mowl, William Kent. Architect, Designer, Opportunist (London: Pimlico, 2006).

3. Müller (note 1), critically examines all those studies throughout his book and gives his own interpretation of the complex meaning of the ensemble as a whole. A particular merit of this monograph is that it brings together a vast array of documentary sources about the house, the gardens and the patron, General James Dormer, who was the driving force behind the creation of Rousham as we still see it in large parts today.

4. The letter was already known and quoted by Kenneth Woodbridge, ‘William Kent's gardening. The Rousham letters’, Apollo, c/152, 1974, pp. 282–291. It was first published in full by Mavis Batey, ‘The way to view Rousham by Kent's gardener’, Garden History, xi/2, 1983, pp. 125–132. Later republications by Müller (note 1), pp. 18–25 and Patrick Eyres (ed.), Rousham. The Extant Augustan Garden Designed by William Kent Outside Oxford (Leeds: New Arcadian Press, 1985) (New Arcadians' Journal, No. 19), pp. 3–4. Although originally named John MacClary, he called himself Clary at least by 1738 as is documented in the numerous letters mentioning him; several examples are in the appendix of Müller, 1998.

5. Hal Moggridge, ‘Notes on Kent's Garden at Rousham’, Journal of Garden History, vi/3, 1986, p. 191. Moggridge's conclusion that there would be more than a thousand different variations to visit seems excessive. It is a purely statistical figure taking into account any minute stretch of path and has little to do with a different experience of the visit.

6. John Dixon Hunt, ‘“Lordship of the Feet”. Toward a poetics of movement in the garden’, in: M. Conan (ed.), Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2003), pp. 208–209. I also agree that a visitor is offered a number of equally important routes. The problem with Clary's description is that it is very selective and calculated. He tries to mention individual features only once even if they could be seen from other places, too. The Pyramid is a case in point. It is perfectly visible, indeed unmissable, from the river walk after the Great Slope but Clary (cf. Batey [note 4], p. 130) only points out a little wooden bridge and cascade (both since disappeared), saving any mention of the Pyramid for the return path. Problems with Clary's description of the Vale of Venus will be discussed below.

7. In the early eighteenth century, the slope was laid out as five terraces.

8. Müller (note 1), plate 2.

9. Peter Willis, Charles Bridgeman and the English Landscape Garden (London: Zwemmer, 1977), p. 67.

10. Ibid., plate 61; Müller (note 1), plate 3.

11. Another path between river and Elm Walk in the survey map is not present in Bridgeman's plan.

12. Müller (note 1), pp. 12 and 85–91, gives the date as around 1725 on the basis of Willis. 1725 is also the date given for the creation of the Bowling Green by the Oxford builder William Townsend, or Townesend (Woodbridge [note 4], p. 282). Townsend was involved with works at Rousham for a long time after this, and his name is still connected with the Doric Temple in the gardens which he erected, presumably according to Kent's design. For his activity in Oxford see W. G. Hiscock, ‘William Townesend, mason and architect of Oxford’, Architectural Review, 1945 (October), pp. 99–107, and Howard Colvin, ‘The Townesends of Oxford: a firm of Georgian master‐masons and its accounts’, in: Georgian Group Journal, x, 2000, pp. 43–60.

13. From 1721 to the supposed mid‐1720s is a very short time. The survey plan was about property boundaries and connected benefits. It did not need to show internal layouts and does so only quite crudely. Yet it still shows the main paths which appear also in the Bridgeman plan. Lastly, the inscription in the 1721 survey plan calls the relevant part of the estate ‘The New Garden’. How likely is it that there was yet another new garden at Rousham some four years before Bridgeman? It is a curious contradiction that Willis (note 9), p. 129, firmly attributes Rousham's Elm Walk to Bridgeman while the outline of the same Elm Walk (though without identifying inscription) already exists in the 1721 survey from which he supposedly derived his design.

14. A well‐known and frequently published plan (e.g. Müller [note 1], plates 4 and 5), conserved at Rousham House, shows the garden layout at the time of Kent's involvement. Müller (note 1), pp. 62–64, assumes in accordance with previous studies that the plan may have been drawn up by the steward William White and the gardener John Clary for the occasion of Alexander Pope's Rousham visit in July 1739 to be used as a basis for discussions.

15. An anonymous drawing of Rousham House with Kent's proposed library and kitchen wing added on both sides shows this group right outside the garden door of the house (Müller [note 1], plate 59). This is an absurd placement right in the way of everybody entering the garden through this door. It is doubtful if Kent ever envisaged such a situation for the group. The drawing also shows other inconsistencies with reality, e.g. that the Bowling Green is level with the house rather than lowered, or a lush row of very tall trees reaching the house on both sides of the lawn. While it is interesting to see windows and round niches in Kent's side wings instead of gothic niches for sculpture, the accuracy of the drawing with regards to previous planning stages has to be treated with caution.

16. Müller (note 1), pp. 150–151, convincingly argues that Scheemakers did not base his composition on the group in the garden of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, as has been claimed up to then, but on a small bronze from the circle of Giambologna, signed by Antonio Susini. With this in mind, much of the presumed allegorical connection of Rousham with Tivoli (as first formulated by Simon Pugh, ‘Nature as a Garden. A Conceptual Tour of Rousham’, Studio, clxxxvi/959, 1973, p. 122), already highly speculative in the first place, must now be doubted even more. The only basis for this presumed connection lies in the wrong identification of the Tivoli group as the prototype for the Rousham group.

17. So inscribed in the White and Clary plan of 1739.

18. Batey (note 4), p. 128.

19. The group is not actually placed axially in front of the centre of the house but shifted slightly towards the east.

20. Today Praeneste and the Vale of Venus are not visible from the road while the foliage is out due mainly to the overgrowth of trees along the left bank of the river outside Rousham estate and therefore outside their control. The Apollo statue is also difficult to spot through the overgrowth.

21. An intriguing set of the alignments, visual relations and ‘controlling lines’ can be found in several illustrations to Moggridge (note 5).

22. Townsend's Building.

23. The figure was considered to be Apollo or Antinous but is probably neither. Müller (note 1), p. 62, sees it as Hermes, based on Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), cat. no. 5. Müller (note 1) acknowledges that Dormer intended to demonstrate to travellers that this is the home of a connoisseur, but does not identify the layout of the whole garden to be subject to the same intention.

24. Woodbridge (note 4), p. 291, note 12, briefly mentions the analogy of both landscape settings.

25. Quoted after Müller (note 1), p. 267. Woodbridge (note 4), pp. 285–286, describes the clearing of trees which obscured Praeneste as ‘an accident which became incorporated in the design’. I could not disagree more and see it as an important concept right from the start.

26. Preserved at Rousham House, commonly dated around the time of Kent's first involvement with the garden design, i.e. around 1738.

27. Ceres, Bacchus, Mercury, Faun and Pan. Pan is dated 1701 (Woodbridge [note 4], p. 291, n.18; Müller [note 1], p. 67).

28. There are many dots on Bridgeman's plan which could indicate the position of a sculpture, a vase or a similar feature. Two such dots are in the Theatre.

29. The fountain is mentioned by Clary in his letter: ‘a very fine Fountain, that plays forty feet high, and falls down among shells’ (Batey [note 4], p. 130). All trace of the fountain has since vanished.

30. The prototype for the swans can be found in the Fountain of Venus at William of Orange's park of Het Loo near Apeldoorn as noted by Monty Don in his 2008 BBC television series ‘Around the World in 80 Gardens’. At Het Loo four such swans with their heads pointing upwards are spouting water towards a statue of Venus. The two nearly identical swans at Rousham hold their heads straight forward, receive a putto each and are turned away from Venus. The putti have been stolen some time ago but are recorded in a number of photographs in older publications.

31. [From the upper cascade] ‘you carry your eye still on you see a Fountain playing thirty feet High, that is five inches Diameter, behind which stands a Figur Venus, on each side of her stands a Cupid riding upon swans Backs, all three upon handsom pedestals, and all this Backt with very fine tall Evergreens of Deferant Sorts’ (Batey [note 4], p. 130).

32. Therefore, while certainly interesting, Clary's sequence is not the best or even the only way to view Rousham.

33. Henry Avery Tipping, ‘Rousham, Oxfordshire. The Seat of Mr. C. Cottrell Dormer’, Country Life, xxvii, 1910, pp. 306–315.

34. The shape of the right arm suggests that this Mercury is not identical with the Mercury in the theatre. However, Woodbridge (note 4), p. 291, n.18, says: ‘The present owner installed the Venus now there, and returned Mercury to the theatre below Praeneste’.

35. These photographs were used to illustrate another series of Country Life articles: Christopher Hussey, ‘A Georgian Arcady, William Kent's gardens at Rousham, Oxfordshire’, Country Life, xcix, 1946, pp. 1084–1087 and 1130–1133.

36. James G. Turner, ‘The sexual politics of landscape. Images of Venus in eighteenth‐century English poetry and landscape gardening’, Studies in Eighteenth‐Century Culture, ii, 1982, p. 365, n. 22. See also Woodbridge (note 4), p. 291, n. 18, as quoted above.

37. See the photograph by Edwin Smith for Edward Hyams and Edwin Smith, The English Garden (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), plate 48.

38. I am grateful to Ulrich Müller for confirming this date.

39. These photographs were used by Tim Richardson, ‘Light touches at Rousham’, Country Life, cxcvi/49, 2002, pp. 74–77. In 2007, Clive Nichols confirmed to me that ‘these photographs were taken approximately 15 years ago’, i.e. c.1992.

40. Horace Walpole, Essay on modern Gardening (Strawberry Hill: T. Kirgate, 1785), p. 55.