14 JUNE 2010
£12 MILLION RESTORATION OF CHISWICK HOUSE GARDENS UNVEILED/
Chiswick House Gardens is a site of international importance
both as the birthplace of the English Landscape Movement, and as the setting
for one of the most beautiful houses in London. The regeneration of the gardens
is a result of many years of campaigning, four years of fund-raising and two
years of work on the site.
English Heritage (manager of the House) and the London
Borough of Hounslow (owner of the Gardens) established The Chiswick House and
Gardens Trust as an independent charity to drive forward an ambitious rescue
plan for the Gardens and secure its future for the 21st century.
The Restoration
The garden restoration, managed by English Heritage, and
supported by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £7.9 million, recovers the
original vistas and design from decades of disrepair and underfunding, and also
repairs and restores the statuary and garden buildings. The result is an
inspiring balance between a historic landscape and a public park.
Highlights include the planting of over 1,600 trees,
including trees propagated from the original 18th century cedars of Lebanon;
the opening up of historic views from the Classic Bridge, the complete
restoration of the 19th century conservatory housing a rare and internationally
important collection of camellias; the planting of native trees and shrubs in
the Northern Wilderness, and the restoration of the Walled Gardens, which will
be open to the public on special days.
To complement the restoration, award-winning architects
Caruso St John have designed a new café within the grounds, on a carefully
chosen site close to Chiswick House on the east side. The new café provides
indoor seating for 80 people and external seating for over 100, and forms the
social hub for the park, with a newly created children’s playground beside it.
The Importance of the Garden
Chiswick House Gardens, spread over 65 acres , are known
throughout the world as the birthplace of the English Landscape Movement and
have inspired countless designed landscapes from Blenheim Palace in Oxford, to
Central Park in New York. They were originally created by Lord Burlington and
William Kent who worked on them throughout the 1720’s and 1730’s as a setting
for Lord Burlington’s magnificent Chiswick House, the first and one of the
finest examples of neo-Palladian design in England.
Among the many famous features of the gardens are:
-Lord Burlington and
William Kent's Western Lawn linking the House and lake, dating from the 18th
century.
-The Inigo Jones Gateway, acquired by Lord Burlington in
1738 from his friend Sir Hans Sloane;
-The Cascade, an Italian renaissance-style waterfall
designed by Burlington and Kent dating from around 1738;
- Exedra, a lawn lined by alternating cypresses and stone
urns closed by a semicircular dark yew hedge, forming a backdrop to Lord
Burlington's collection of ancient Roman and 18th century sculpture;
-The Lake, crossed by an elegant stone bridge, in a design
attributed to James Wyatt;
-The Raised Terrace, planted with sweet shrubs including
roses and honeysuckle which offers celebrated views of the Villa;
-The Conservatory, completed in 1813, with the oldest
collection of camellias outside China and Japan.
The restoration of the gardens at Chiswick was made possible
by funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage, the London Borough
of Hounslow, The Wolfson Foundation, The Garfield Weston Foundation and The
Monument Trust, with additional support from many other individuals and
organisations.
Chiswick House and Gardens Trust was set up in April 2005
between English Heritage and the London Borough of Hounslow under the
Chairmanship of Rupert Hambro. The creation of the Trust unites the management
of the site and its key role is to drive forward the improvements to Chiswick
House and Gardens
John Penrose, Tourism and Heritage Minister, said:
"Chiswick House Gardens is an oasis of tranquility right in the heart of
bustling London. This partnership project has secured the future of this
beautiful landscape, which will bring hours of pleasure to tourists and local
residents alike."
Sarah Finch Crisp, Director, Chiswick House and Gardens
Trust, said: "This is a new beginning for Chiswick House and Gardens and
we are grateful to so many people for their wonderful support in restoring the
gardens as a national treasure and much loved local park, open for everyone to
enjoy. Working with our partners, English Heritage and The London Borough of
Hounslow, at last we can look forward to a secure future for the Gardens and a
major step towards our next goal of re-presenting the House and rebuilding its
collection."
Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, said:
"The Arcadian image of the Landscape Garden took Europe by storm in the
18th century and is one of England's greatest contributions to Western culture.
Chiswick was the birthplace of this cultural revolution and we are incredibly
proud that by lending our expertise, time and money, the restoration of this
European masterpiece is complete.”
Cllr Jagdish Sharma, Leader of Hounslow Council: "The
London Borough of Hounslow is proud to be celebrating the launch of Chiswick
House Gardens which have been gloriously restored. We are delighted to have
helped establish The Chiswick House and Gardens Trust as a way of ensuring the
future wellbeing of this eminent public park and grateful to the many
organisations and individuals who have supported this transformation."
Dame Jenny Abramsky, Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund,
said: "Chiswick House and Gardens is one of London's most picturesque
locations combining an elegant house in a parkland setting that many people
enjoy every day. The Heritage Lottery Fund is proud to have played a role in
this important restoration project which has been undertaken with painstaking
care and dedication by everyone involved. The result is a reinvigorated site
with the welcome addition of a spacious new cafe."
£12m facelift for historic
gardens of Chiswick House
Major English Heritage
project restores Chiswick House gardens in west London to their 18th-century
glory
Maev Kennedy
The Guardian, Monday 14 June 2010 / http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/14/chiswick-house-gardens-restoration
Historic gardens on London's outskirts where 18th-century
taste-makers strolled, stealing inspiration for gardens copied across Europe,
are formally relaunched today after a £12m restoration of their trampled
glories.
The vast cost of restoring the gardens around Chiswick
House, including a £7.9m Heritage Lottery grant, is less in real terms than
Lord Burlington and his successors spent from the 1720s onwards. In creating a
suitable setting for his Palladian mansion with his gardener William Kent he
dammed a river, moved a road, levelled hills and raised hillocks, and bought
his neighbour's estate just to demolish the house and grab the garden.
A few generations later, an even more passionate gardening
duke bought and flattened another neighbour's property and added magnificent
features including the longest conservatory in England, filled with camellias
imported from China and the Himalayas. The surviving plants constitute the
rarest collection in the world and include unique species still to be
identified.
The 26
hectares (65 acres ), flanked by roaring traffic and close
to Heathrow, are regarded as the birthplace of the picturesque English
landscape garden, and have been copied across the world from Blenheim Palace in
Oxford to Central Park in New York.
In the 20th century, Chiswick House garden became a much
loved and heavily used public park, but the original picturesque lines were
gradually lost with features removed for easier care or allowed to become
overgrown.
The restoration work has included planting 1,800 trees,
including some propagated from surviving 18th-century specimens planted by Lord
Burlington. A pair of sphinxes stare enigmatically down from the gateposts; the
originals were sold 80 years ago in an auction that scattered most of the
original contents of the house, and now mark the famous In and Out club on
Piccadilly, just up the road from Lord Burlington's palatial London home which
now houses the Royal Academy and the Learned Societies.
A copy of the original statue of Diana has been placed back
on her tall column in the heart of the rose garden created for Georgiana, the
politically minded Burlington bride whose life was told in the book and film
The Duchess. Georgian and 19th-century flower beds have been dug out again and
filled with the plants carefully recorded by generations of head gardeners, and
the walled kitchen gardens now hold the largest collection of historic fruit
and vegetable plants in London.
Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage, which
led the restoration, described Chiswick as the birthplace of a cultural
revolution. "The Arcadian image of the landscape garden took Europe by
storm in the 18th century, and is one of England's greatest contributions to
western culture."
"We are incredibly proud that by [thanks to] our
expertise, time and money, the restoration of this European masterpiece is
complete."
The house and gardens have been under separate management
for most of a century, but English Heritage and the local authorities have now
handed over responsibility to a new trust which will care for both. The launch
of the project in 2005 was greeted with intense local suspicion, but peace now
appears to have broken out and a dog walkers' group is working on fundraising
with the new trust.
Sarah Finch Crisp, director of the trust, stressed that they
have no intention of charging for admission to the grounds: "These gardens
are treasured by local people, and they are a very important part of our plans
for the future, whether they come to walk their dogs, have a cup of tea in our
new cafe, or just sit under a tree, read a book and have a moment of
tranquility in a beautiful place."
The architectural historian Richard Hewlings has established
that Chiswick House was an attempt by Lord Burlington to create a Roman villa,
rather than Renaissance pastiche, situated in a symbolic Roman garden. Chiswick
Villa is inspired in part by several buildings of the 16th-century Italian
architects Andrea Palladio and his assistant Vincenzo Scamozzi. The house is
often said to be directly inspired by Palladio's Villa Capra "La
Rotonda" near Vicenza, due to the fact that architect Colen Campbell had
offered Lord Burlington a design for a villa very closely based on the Villa
Capra for his use at Chiswick. However, although still clearly influential,
Lord Burlington had rejected this design and it was subsequently used at
Mereworth Castle, Kent. Lord Burlington was not just restricted to the
influence of Andrea Palladio as his library list at Chiswick indicates. He
owned books by influential Italian Renaissance architects such as Sebastiano
Serlio and Leon Battista Alberti and his library contained books by French
architects,sculptors, illustrators and architectural theorists such as Jean
Cotelle, Philibert de l'Orme, Abraham Bosse, Jean Bullant, Salomon de Caus,
Roland Fréart de Chambray, Hugues Sambin, Antoine Desgodetz, and John James's
translation of Claude Perrault's Treatise of the Five Orders. Whether
Palladio's work inspired Chiswick or not, the Renaissance architect exerted an
important influence on Lord Burlington through his plans and reconstructions of
lost Roman buildings; many of these unpublished and little known, were
purchased by Burlington on his second Grand Tour and housed in the Blue Velvet
Room, which served as his study. These reconstructions were the source for many
of the varied geometric shapes within Burlington's Villa, including the use of
the octagon, circle and rectangle (with apses). Possibly the most influential
building reconstructed by Palladio and used at Chiswick was the monumental Roman
Baths of Diocletian: references to this building can be found in the Domed
Hall, Gallery, Library and Link rooms.
Burlington's use of Roman sources can be viewed in the
steep-pitched dome of the villa which is derived from the Pantheon in Rome.
However, the source for the octagonal form of the dome, the Upper Tribunal,
Lower Tribunal and cellar at Chiswick all possibly derive from Vincenzo
Scamozzi's Rocca Pisana near Vicenza. Burlington may also have been influenced
in his choice of octagon from the drawings of the Renaissance architect Sebastiano
Serlio (1475–1554), or from Roman buildings of antiquity (for example, Lord
Burlington owned Andrea Palladio's drawings of the octagonal mausoleum at
Diocletian's Palace at Split in modern Croatia). Archaeological remains have
shown the Roman willingness to experiment with different geometric forms in
their buildings, such as the underground octagonal hall in Nero's Domus Aurea.
The brick-built Villa's facade is faced in Portland stone,
with a small amount of stucco. The finely carved Corinthian capitals on the
projecting six-column portico at Chiswick, carved by John Boson, are derived
from Rome's Temple of Castor and Pollux. The inset door, projecting plinth and
'v'-necked rusticated vermiculation (resembling tufa) were all derived from the
base of Trajan's Column. The short sections of crenellated wall with ball
finials which extend out either side of the villa were symbolic of medieval (or
Roman) fortified town walls and were inspired by their use by Palladio at his
church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice and by Inigo Jones (1573–1652)
(Palladio also produced woodcuts of the Villa Foscari with crenellated sections
of walls in his I quattro libri dell'architettura in 1570, yet in reality they
were never built). To reinforce this link two full-length statues of Palladio
and Jones by the celebrated Flemish-born sculptor John Michael Rysbrack
(1694–1770) are positioned in front of these sections of wall. Palladio's
influence can also be found in the general cubic form of the villa with its
central hall with other rooms leading off its axis. The villa is a half cube of
70 feet
(21 m ) by
70 feet
(21 m ) by
35 feet .[53]
Inside are rooms of 10 feet
(3.0 m )
square, 15 feet
(4.6 m )
square and 15 feet
(4.6 m )
by 20 feet
(6.1 m )
by 25 feet .[citation
needed] The distance from the apex of the dome to the base of the cellar is 70 feet (21 m ), making the whole pile
fit within a perfect, invisible cube. However, the decorative cornice at
Chiswick was derived from a contemporary source, that of James Gibbs's cornice
at the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.
On the portico leading to the Domed Hall is positioned a
bust of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Augustus was regarded by many of the early
18th-century English aristocracy as the greatest of all the Roman Emperors (the
early Georgian era was known as the Augustan Age). This link with the Emperor
Augustus was reinforced in the garden at Chiswick through the presence of
Egyptianizing objects such as sphinxes (who symbolically guard the 'Temple'
front and rear), obelisks and stone lions. Lord Burlington and his
contemporaries were conscious of the fact that it was Augustus who invaded
Egypt and brought back Egyptian objects and erected them in Rome. The influence
of Rome manifested itself at Chiswick through Burlington's strategic deployment
of statues, including those of a Borghese gladiator, a Venus de' Medici, a wolf
(used to inspire nostalgic memories of the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus
and Remus, a goat (symbolising the zodiac of Capricorn, the birth sign of the
Emperor Augustus) and a boar located at the rear of the villa (symbolic of the
great boar hunt). Inside the villa many references to the Roman goddess Venus
abound, as Venus was the mother of Aeneas who fled Troy and co-founded Rome. On
the forecourt to the villa are several 'term' statues that derive their forms
from the Roman god Terminus, the god of distance and space. Such items
therefore are used as boundary markers, positioned in the hedge at set distances
apart.
At the rear of the villa were positioned 'herm' statues that
derive from the Greek god Hermes, the patron of travellers and thus are
welcoming figures for all who wish to visit Lord Burlington's gardens (Lord
Burlington's gardens at Chiswick were the most visited of all London
villas.[citation needed] A small entrance charge applied).
The house when built was described by John, Lord Hervey as
"Too small to live in, and too big to hang to a watch". John Clerk of
Penicuik described it as "Rather curious than convenient", while
Horace Walpole called it "the beautiful model". It is possible that
one purpose of the villa was as an art gallery, as inventories show more than
167 paintings hanging at Chiswick House in Lord Burlington's lifetime, many
purchased on his two grand tours of Europe.
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William Kent is thought to be the main designer of the
gardens
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Lord Burlington
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The gardens at Chiswick were an attempt to symbolically
recreate a garden of ancient Rome which were believed to have followed the form
of the gardens of Greece. The gardens, like the villa, were inspired by the
architecture of ancient Rome combined with the influence of contemporary poetry
and theatre design. Lord Burlington's gardens were inspired by such gardens as
those of the Emperor Hadrian's Villa Adriana at Tivoli, from which the three
statues at the end of the exedra were alleged to have come.
The gardens at Chiswick were originally of a standard
Jacobean design, but from the 1720s they were in a constant state of
transition. Burlington and Kent experimented with new designs, incorporating
such diverse elements as mock fortifications, a Ha-ha, classical fabriques,
statues, groves, faux Egyptian objects, bowling greens, winding walks, cascades
and water features.
Authors of antiquity, such as Horace and Pliny, were major
influences on 18th century thinkers through their descriptions of their own
gardens, with alleys shaded by trees, parterres, topiary, and fountains. The
first architect of the gardens at Chiswick appears to have been the king's
gardener, Charles Bridgeman, who was believed to have worked on the gardens
with Lord Burlington around 1720,[58] and subsequently with William Kent, whom
Lord Burlington had brought back with him on his return from his second Grand
Tour in 1719. William Kent was inspired by the landscape paintings of the
French artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. The poet Alexander Pope (who
had his own villa with gardens in nearby Twickenham), was involved, and was
responsible for confirming Lord Burlington's belief that Roman and Greek
gardens were largely "informal" affairs, with nature ruled by
God.[citation needed]
Evidence for this belief was provided through his
translation into English of Homer's cornerstones of European literature The
Iliad and The Odyssey which provided brief glimpses of Greek gardens which gave
validation to Burlington's belief in the naturalistic appearance of Roman
gardens. Theatrical aspects were added to the gardens by William Kent, who
studied the theatre and masque designs of Inigo Jones for the Stuart Court
which were owned by Lord Burlington and housed within his villa. Burlington,
Kent and Pope were informed by the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper who
advocated "variety" in a garden, but not complete deformalisation.
The Deer House with its Egyptianesque Vitruvian door
surrounds
The gardens at Chiswick were filled with fabriques (garden
buildings) which illustrated Lord Burlington's knowledge of Roman, Greek,
Egyptian and Renaissance architecture, and statues and architecture which
expressed his Whig (and very possibly Jacobite) ideals.
Lord Burlington's garden at Chiswick was one of the first to
include garden buildings and ancient statues which were to symbolically evoke
the mood and appearance of ancient Rome. Soon after other English gardens such
as Stourhead, Stowe, West Wycombe, Holkham, and Rousham were to follow suit,
creating a type of garden which eventually would become known internationally
as the English Landscape Garden. Lord Burlington's gardens at Chiswick had a
number of these fabriques including the Ionic Temple, Bagnio, Pagan Temple,
Rustic House, and two Deer Houses.
Beyond the exedra in the gardens lies an area known as the
'Orange Tree Garden' in which was situated a small garden building known as the
Ionic Temple. The Ionic Temple is circular in form and is derived from either
the Pantheon in Rome or possibly from the Temple of Romulus. The portico of
this temple is derived from the Temple of Portunus which William Kent
illustrates in the ceiling of the Red Velvet Room within the Villa. Immediately
in front of the Temple lies a circular pool of water with a small obelisk
positioned in its centre. Around the base of the pool of water are three
concentric rings of raised grass conforming originally to a 3:4:5 ratio echoing
the dimensions of the Red and Green Velvet Room within the Villa. A second
obelisk was erected at the centre of another patte d'oie or 'Goose Foot' beyond
the cascade to west of the Villa.
A theatre of hedges known as an exedra was designed by
William Kent and originally displayed ancient statues of three unknown Roman
gentlemen. These three statues were later speculatively 'identified' by the
writer Daniel Defoe (1659–1731) as Caesar (100–44 BC) and Pompey (106–48 BC) responsible
for the decline of the Roman republic, facing a statue of Cicero (106–43 BC),
the defender of the Republic. In 1733 Lord Burlington resigned his positions
within the government and went into active opposition against Robert Walpole,
Britain's first Prime Minister who Burlington regarded as corrupting British
politics and Whig values. However, it was the figures of the poets Horace,
Homer and Virgil, the philosopher Socrates, and the leaders Lucius Verus and
Lycurgus which once graced the exedra whose political message was one of
democracy and anti-tyranny. (William Kent made a similar statement against
Walpole for Lord Cobham. The original design by William Kent for the end of the
exedra was a stone 'Temple of Worthies' which was rejected by Lord Burlington,
but subsequently used by Lord Cobham at Stowe).
William Kent added a cascade (a symbolic grotto), inspired
by the upper cascade of the gardens of the Villa Aldobrandini. Kent's garden
also featured a flower garden, an orchard, an aviary (which included an owl)
and a symmetrical planned arrangement of trees known as the "Grove".
To the side of the Grove was a patte d'oie, or 'Goosefoot', three avenues which
terminated by buildings including the 'Bagnio' (or Casino, designed by Lord
Burlington and Colen Campbell) in 1716, the 'Pagan Temple' (designed by the
Catholic Baroque architect James Gibbs) and the Rustic House (designed by Lord
Burlington).
Terminating one end of the Ha-ha stands a Deer House
designed by Lord Burlington. A second Deer House once stood at the opposite end
of the Ha-ha until replaced by Inigo Jones' gateway in 1738 (see below). Both
Deer Houses featured pyramidal roofs and characteristic 'Virtuvian' doors; a
feature that comes directly from Palladio's woodcuts from his I quattro libri
dell'architettura of 1570. Immediately behind the ha-ha and positioned between
the two Deer Houses was a building known as the Orangery, which, as its name
suggests, originally housed Lords Burlington's orange trees over the cold
winter period (some of these trees were once positioned around the perimeter of
the Ionic Temple). Part of the floor of this building was laid out in imitation
of a Roman mosaic which English Heritage archaeologists in 2009 dated to the
mid 18th century. Next to the remaining Deer Houses stands the Doric column on
which was placed a statue of the Venus di' Medici.
Venus was the most common garden statue in the 18th-century
English garden.
In the 18th century statues of Venus were the most common
statue in a garden as it was known that the goddess Venus was the protector of
gardens and gardeners.[citation needed] The statue that can be seen on the
Doric column today is a copy in Portland stone and was commissioned by the
Chiswick House Friends in 2009. Other statues that Lord Burlington had made for
the gardens included a wolf, a boar, a goat, a lion and lioness, a statue of
the Roman god Mercury, a gladiator, Hercules, and Cain and Abel.
The lawn at the rear of the house was created by 1745 and
planted with young Cedar of Lebanon trees which alternate with stone funerary
urns designed by William Kent. Placed between the urns and the Cedar of Lebanon
are three more sphinxes orientated to face the rising sun.
A lake was created around 1727 by widening the Bollo Brook.
The excess soil was then heaped up behind William Kent's cascade to produce an
elevated walkway for people to admire the gardens and a view of the nearby
River Thames. A gateway designed by Inigo Jones in 1621 at Beaufort House in
Chelsea (home of Sir Hans Sloane) was bought and removed by Lord Burlington and
rebuilt in the gardens at Chiswick in 1738.
The Inigo Jones gateway, bought by Lord Burlington from Sir
Hans Sloane
Lord Burlington is sometimes said to have been influenced by
largely informal Chinese gardens, but the flavour of the Orient was not evoked
in Burlington's classically inspired gardens, which were universally Roman in
outlook. Unlike Stowe, with its Temple of Worthies and busts such as the Black
Prince, Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, Burlington's gardens at Chiswick did
not romance or mythologise England's illustrious past. This was possibly due to
Burlington's intense dislike of the Gothic style which he regarded as barbaric
and backward.
Lord Burlington's gardens at Chiswick were one of the most
painted of English gardens in the 18th century. The painter Peter Andreas
Rysbrack was commissioned to paint a series of eight paintings to record the
transformation of the garden from formal Jacobean to informal picturesque at
the end of the 1750s. Together with copies of a second set these paintings
today hang in the Green Velvet Room. Other artists who were commissioned to
record the appearance of the gardens were England's first landscape painter
George Lambert (1700–1765), the French painter Jacques Rigaud (1681–1754) and
the cartographer John Rocque (1709–1762) who produced an engraved survey of
Chiswick in 1736 showing the Villa and many of its garden buildings.
The walled gardens were originally part of a house owned by
Sir Stephen Fox in the 17th century. In the early 19th century the house and
gardens became part of the Chiswick House estate. Fox's house was demolished, though
the gardens were kept.
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1736 engraving by John Rocque of the garden layout with sketches
of the house
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Plan of Chiswick House
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