John Dixon Hunt

Greater Perfections explores the meanings of garden and its relationship to other interventions into the natural world. But above all, it offers a new and challenging account of the role of representation in garden art.Journal

The Practice of Garden Theory

Greater Perfections

English art critic John Ruskin was one of the great visionaries of his time, and his influential books and letters on the power of art challenged the foundations of Victorian life. He loved looking. Sometimes it informed the things he wrote, but often it provided access to the many topographical and cultural topics he explored—rocks, plants, birds, Turner, Venice, the Alps. In The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place, John Dixon Hunt focuses for the first time on what Ruskin drew, rather than wrote, offering a new perspective on Ruskin’s visual imagination. Through analysis of more than 150 drawings and sketches, many reproduced here, he shows how Ruskin’s art shaped his writings, his thoughts, and his sense of place.

The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place

Morna Livingston

Laurie Olin

Benedetta Origo

A beautiful homage to the breathtaking Italian gardens retraces the history of these brilliantly tailored grounds at La Foce, Tuscany, while showcasing their most spectacular assets and describing the history of the gardens.

A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany

La Foce

Most books on garden history describe the ways in which gardens have been created. By contrast, The Afterlife of Gardens examines the ways that gardens have been experienced. Using examples from many sites around the world, John Dixon Hunt examines responses to gardens, from Renaissance sites to Baroque creations to modern highway landscaping. Examining how a garden has been experienced extends its history beyond the physical into cultural terms, and the author describes how this "afterlife" of gardens, as understood and experienced by many generations, is often "redesigned" in visitors' imaginative and cultural responses. Hunt shows how the complete history of a garden must extend beyond the moment of its design and the aims of the designer to include its subsequent reception. He raises questions about the preservation of historical sites and provides lessons for today's designers. This book will appeal to all who have a professional interest in gardens, as well as to the wider general audience for gardens and landscapes of past and present.

The Afterlife of Gardens

His Life and Writings

Andrew Marvell

No city has played a more seminal role in the development of "landscape" as a concept than has Venice. In a city where the land and gardens are reclaimed from a lagoon environment whose ecology is in jeopardy today, they are the very basis of life, dwelling, and culture. This book develops a typology of gardens distinguished by their predominantly small scale, all of which work with essential dimensions of landscape architecture: private and public space, usefulness and beauty, and open space in a densely built environment that is permeated with history. From nearly one hundred city gardens, squares, and courtyards, public parks and temporary gardens, this book identifies garden layout and design elements that involve both material factors â spatial and design-related features â as well as the social circumstances of their use. The areas presented include the Arsenale, where the Paradise Garden was created for the 2008 Biennale by Gustafson Porter, and the giardini and public gardens that â since their creation two hundred years ago â have served as a laboratory for making Venice into a modern city with a strong appeal to the "natural".

Place, Typology, and Perception

The Venetian City Garden

Michael Leslie

A Cultural History of Gardens: In the Modern age

Deepens understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetics and poetry by delving into the psychology and changing designs of landscape gardens and their impact on poetic expression and painting. Bibliogs

Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century

The Figure in the Landscape

Mostly modern critical readings, including a selection of comments by the author's contemporaries, and some of the author himself.

A Casebook

Pope: The Rape of the Lock

Faith M. Holland

Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin

The Ruskin Polygon

Erik Jong

Gouden Eeuw Van de Hollandse Tuinkunst

Michel Conan

Former Director of Garden and Landscape Studies Michel Conan

Claire Goldstein

Papers from a symposium held at the University of Pennsylvania.

Chapters of a New History

Tradition and Innovation in French Garden Art

J. Paul Getty Museum

Christopher Bedford

Penelope Curtis

This catalogue celebrates the recently installed collection of twentieth-century sculpture donated to the J. Paul Getty Trust by the Fran and Ray Stark Trust in 2005. The book takes the reader on a visual tour of the J. Paul Getty Museum's new sculpture gardens and installations, which features twenty-eight works by artists such as Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Ferdinand Léger, Roy Lichtenstein, René Magritte, Aristide Maillol, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi. The book offers essays on the curatorial decisions involved in establishing harmonious groupings; a history of European and American sculpture within built outdoor environments and gardens; and catalogue entries that discuss individual pieces within their broader art-historical contexts.

The Fran and Ray Stark Collection of 20th-century Sculpture at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Peter Willis

This anthology and commentary on the English landscape garden is intended both for the general reader and for students in the visual arts. It has arisen partly out of our needs as teachers of literature, architecture and painting to provide students with the documents upon which they can base their own thinking. But we also feel that the provision of many essential sources for the one art that England contributed to Europe since the Renaissance will enable those interested to support their studies of actual landscapes with primary literary and visual material. For this reason we have taken our texts from the original editions or manuscripts, and presented them with the minimum of editorial interference: unless otherwise indicated, extracts appear in their earliest form and are given the date of their earliest appearance.

The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820

The Genius of the Place

A collection of ten interdisciplinary essays on the history and diversity of the Italian garden.

Art, Design and Culture

The Italian Garden

This edition reprints the text of Pope's classic poem -- both the five-canto 1714 version and the facsimilie of the original 1712 version -- together with a broad selection of documents. Including correspondence, poems, broadsides, reviews, and parodies, the documents focus special attention on Pope's life and career as well as on eighteenth-century poetic traditions and innovations, social habits and assumptions, historical events, and political implications. A general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology of Pope's life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a selected bibliography, and a generous collection of maps, portraits, and illustrations make this volume a unique scholarly edition of this classic work of eighteenth-century literature.

A collection of Hunt's essays, many previously unpublished, dealing with the ways in which men and women have given meaning to gardens and landscapes, especially with the ways in which gardens have represented the world of nature "picturesquely".

Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture

Gardens and the Picturesque

Michael Corris

David Lomas

A highly illustrated survey of the use of words (or language) in art. Art, Word and Image asks what it means when a painting is 'invaded' by language - how do the two forms converse and combine, and what messages are intended for the viewer?

John Dixon Hunt

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