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The leading landscape gardener of late Georgian England, Humphry Repton was innovative and prolific. This work frames his life in five domains - the road, the country, the picturesque landscape, the aristocratic estate and the urban periphery.
A School in England: The History of Repton is the last book by the respected historian and Old Reptonian Hugh Brogan. This final masterwork is the fruit of twenty-five years' research, completed shortly before Brogan's death in 2019, using hitherto untapped sources (such as the Fisher family papers) and delivered with his trademark acid wit and astute observation. Here is a clear and invaluable account of how Repton evolved from grammar school to major public school, acquiring a national reputation and sending out boys across the globe in quest of fortune or adventure, as well as producing such sporting greats as C. B. Fry, Harold Abrahams and 'Bunny' Austin. Woven through with strands of drama, humour and pathos, A School in England is the first scholarly history of Repton for many years and the first by an award-winning historian.
Garden design evolved hugely during the Georgian period – as symbols of wealth and stature, the landed aristocracy had been using gardens for decades. Yet during the eighteenth century, society began to homogenise, and the urban elite also started demanding landscapes that would reflect their positions. The gardens of the aristocracy and the gentry were different in appearance, use and meaning, despite broad similarities in form. Underlying this was the importance of place, of the landscape itself and its raw material. Contemporaries often referred to the need to consult the ‘genius of the place’ when creating a new designed landscape, as the place where the garden was located was crit...
Inspired by French and Italian landscape painting, a number of eighteenth-century artist-gardeners led by William Kent created an art-form unique in the West, althought favoured from times of antiquity in China and Japan: the picturesque garden - virtually a landscape picture made not of paint on canvas but of real country and buildings. Towering above the rest of the professional practitioners of this art, in terms both of genius and industry, were two remarkable men, Capability Brown and his successor Humphry Repton. Both transformed many thousands of acres of England and Wales from 'natural' into 'picturesque' landscape; both , in the course of their work, met many of the leading men of their day, and George III made a friend of Brown; both, in their different ways, exerted a lasting influence on other landscape designers, including those of America and Europe. -- Book jacket.
A definitive survey of the glorious British landscapes designed by Humphry Repton, whose influence is felt everywhere from the rolling meadows and kitchen gardens of English estates to New York City’s Central Park. Widely acknowledged as the last great landscape designer of the eighteenth century, Humphry Repton created work that survives as a bridge between the picturesque theory of Capability Brown and the pastoral philosophy of Frederick Law Olmsted. By turns inspired by and in opposition to the grandeur of Brown’s estates, Repton’s contribution to the British landscape encompassed a tremendous range, from subtle adjustments that emphasized the natural features of the countryside to...
This book provides an overview of the extent to which the 18th-century English Landscape Garden spread through Europe and Russia. While this type of garden acted widely as an inspiration, it was not slavishly copied but adapted to local conditions, circumstances and agendas. A garden 'in the English style' is commonly used to denote a landscape garden in Europe, while the term 'landscape garden' is used for layouts that are naturalistic in plan and resemble natural scenery, though they might be highly contrived and usually large in scale. The landscape garden took hold in mainland Europe from about 1760. Due to the differing geopolitical character of several of the countries, and a distinct ...
The Viking Great Army that swept through England between AD 865 and 878 altered the course of British history. Since the late 8th century, Viking raids on the British Isles had been a regular feature of life, but the winter of 865 saw a fundamental shift that would change the political, economic and social landscape forever. Instead of making quick smash-and-grab summer raids for silver and slaves, Vikings now remained in England for the winter and became immersed in its communities. Some settled permanently, acquiring land and forming a new hybrid Anglo-Scandinavian culture. The Viking army was here to stay. Its presence was a catalyst for new towns and new industries, while transformations...
This publication reproduces all the text pages and illustrations from the two Red Books in the collection of the Garden Library at Dumbarton Oaks; that for Brandsbury, produced in 1789 as the first Red Book, and the one for Glemham Hall, produced in 1791.
Study of late Anglo-Saxon texts and grave monuments illuminates contemporary attitudes towards dying and the dead. Pre-Conquest attitudes towards the dying and the dead have major implications for every aspect of culture, society and religion of the Anglo-Saxon period; but death-bed and funerary practices have been comparatively and unjustly neglected by historical scholarship. In her wide-ranging analysis, Dr Thompson examines such practices in the context of confessional and penitential literature, wills, poetry, chronicles and homilies, to show that complex and ambiguous ideas about death were current at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society. Her study also takes in grave monuments, showing in particular how the Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture of the ninth to the eleventh centuries may indicate notonly the status, but also the religious and cultural alignment of those who commissioned and made them. Victoria Thompson is Lecturer in the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands.