Picturesque Landscaping and Estate Management: Uvedale Price at Foxley, 1770–1829

Abstract

Georgian landscaping is conventionally studied as an example of high culture, in terms of the history of art, literature and aesthetics. We take a more down to earth view and look at landscaping as an example of estate management, in terms of such topics as farming, planting, leases and rents. We do not pretend that the study of estate management offers a sort of ground-truth for understanding landscaping. Terms like ‘rent’ and ‘estate’ are of course no more eternal, nor less ideological, than terms like ‘picturesque’ and ‘landscape’. We will not neglect high culture, indeed a central theme of the paper is how the aesthetics of painting helped frame estate management. Even a casual reading of the literature on ‘improvement’ in the eighteenth century reveals a complex overlapping of not just economic and aesthetic issues but moral and political ones too. And the point of this paper is to reinsert landscaping and estate management into this complex.

Pollarding Trees: Changing Attitudes to a Traditional Land Management Practice in Britain 1600–1900

“…They admired their huge size: 'A pollard of this species (beech) near the mansion-house, measures at the ordinary height 20 feet in girth, its top branches exceeding the diameter of 30 yards' (Vancouver, 1808: 262). These aesthetic views are similar to those popularised by Uvedale Price in his works on the picturesque (Daniels and Watkins, 1991;Price, 1794;. At Gosfield, by the road leading from the turnpike to Mr. Thurlow's house, are two venerable remains of oak pollards (.…”

“…Yet their deformity, unusual shape and great age were appreciated by others (Nicol, 1803;Pontey, 1808, Kennion, 1815Craig, 1821;Monteath, 1824;Sinclair, 1832;Anonymous, 1853;Coleman, 1859;Cook, 1902;Maw, 1909). The rise of the picturesque movement meant that old, overgrown pollards became celebrated while regularly cropped trees were seen as anachronistic adjuncts to agriculture (Daniels and Watkins, 1991). The picturesque theorist Uvedale Price wrote on the 'bad effects of stripping and cropping trees' in 1786 and told the landscape improver Humphry Repton in 1792 that 'he would deserve a statue if he could inspire Mr Pitt with such an aversion to [stripped elms] as to make him exert his great authority + eloquence to put an end to such a horrid practice'.…”

“…This tension had been voiced by Uvedale Price in his Essay of the Picturesque which became perhaps the most influential aesthetic text for the landed gentry during this period (Daniels and Watkins, 1991;Price, 1810). This tension had been voiced by Uvedale Price in his Essay of the Picturesque which became perhaps the most influential aesthetic text for the landed gentry during this period (Daniels and Watkins, 1991;Price, 1810).…”

“…Rackham (1976: 171) noticed that the practice of pollarding willows on the banks of rivers was recorded in the thirteenth century. Pollards are frequent in the landscape paintings of Gainsborough (Daniels and Watkins, 1991;Sloman, 2002). Pollards are frequent in the landscape paintings of Gainsborough (Daniels and Watkins, 1991;Sloman, 2002).…”

Designed Landscapes: The Regional Dimension

“…Other aspects of eighteenth-century landscape style may also have both a regional, and an ideological, aspect. Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins, for example, have argued that the picturesque ideas promulgated by the wealthy Herefordshire landowners Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight in the 1790s represented in part a desire for a landscape style which invoked and celebrated local character, as against the stereotyped 'home counties' pastoral of the typical Brownian landscape park; and that this had ideological connotations, expressing local paternalism against the national styles of a London-based, more market-orientated economy (Daniels and Watkins 1991).…”