building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

compared to that of John Claudius Loudon in England. The intentions and contents
of his book A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted
to North America (1841) and his magazine The Horticulturist (1846) were inspired by
the publications of Loudon, with whom he had corresponded. 246 . He sets out
precise theses, focalising first and foremost on the theoretical significance of
landscaping which, in his opinion, “is an artistic combination of the beautiful in
nature and art –an union of natural expression and harmonious cultivation‐ is
capable of affording us the highest and most intellectual enjoyment to be found in
any cares or pleasures belonging to the soil” 247 .
The conceptual heart of Downing’s ideas revolved around the romantic notion of
beauty, but did not move to search for the sublime, as did the artists of the Hudson
River School. Downing never lost sight of the pragmatic side and kept a balance
between romantic impulses and scientific, horticultural and botanical research.
From the preface of his work he clarified the way in which the taste of rural
improvements [Figures 108‐112] had silently and at the same time rapidly taken
over in the United States. However, it has to be specified that accounts of this
cultural and economic wealth had nothing to do with the life of the pioneer and
contact with the wilderness: “While yet in the far west the pioneer constructs his
rude hut of logs for a dwelling, and sweeps away with his axe the lofty forest trees
that encumber the ground, in the older portions of the Union, bordering the
Atlantic, we are surrounded by all the luxuries and refinements that belong to an
old and long cultivated country” 248 .
Downing’s publications are witness of this sophisticated, elegant approach to
landscape practised by the north‐eastern states.
If, on the one hand, Downing declared that the purpose and soul of the landscape
was its beauty, on the other, his reflections were almost always turned to the
country house [Figures 113‐114]: “In it we seek to embody our ideal of a rural
246 During the review of the second edition of his Treatise Downing wrote in the next edition a note in
praise of Loudon the following words: “His herculean labors as an author have at last destroyed him;
and in his death we lose one who has done more than any other person that ever lived, to
popularize, and render universal, a taste for Gardening and Domestic Architecture”, Ibid., p. 21
247 Ibid., p. 18
248 Ibid., p. vii
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