Doening, Andrew J. ( Downing, Andrew Jackson, born in 1815-52 Am American nurseryman, landscape gardener, and pomologist, born at Newburgh, N.Y. His influence upon American horticultural development is probably unsurpassed. To him must be accredited the introduction and development of the free or English school of landscape gardening in America. He planned the grounds about the National Capitol, the White House, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. To his foresight and to his spirit as communicated to others, we owe our present American system of broad free municipal parks. Downing's monumental work, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America 91845) greatly extended by his brother, Charles, together with his mumerous essays, form the buok of his contribution to the literature of horticulture. Another important work is the Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841). Those essays were first published in the Horticulturist, of which hewas editor at the time of his death, and afterwards in book form under the title of Rural Essays (1854) for which book George William Curtis wrote a memoir of Downing. He W as drowned while attemptin to save the lives of others on the burning Hudson River Steamer Henry Clay. UNH LIBRARY 3 4600 00844 6392 TO LIVE IN THE NEW WORLD A.J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening Judith K. Major Note: See David Schuyler. Apostla ofTaste, J.H.U. Press. 1997. THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND © 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Bembo by Graphic Composi- tion, Inc., and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Major, Judith K. To live in the New World : A. J. Downing and American landscape gardening / Judith K. Major. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-13331-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Downing, A.J. (Andrew Jackson), 1815-1852. 2. Landscape architects-United States-Biography. 3. Landscape architecture-United States-History-19th century. 4. Landscape gardening- United States-History- - 19th century. 5. Downing, A. J. (Andrew Jackson), 1815-1852. Treatise on the theory and practice of landscape gardening. I. Title. SB470.D68M36 1997 712'.092-dc20 96-36407 CIP Apostle of Taste ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING 1815-1852 David Schuyler The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London 11/6/2015 LALH Books - Apostle of Taste Search home books magazine exhibitions films impact membership LALH Library of American Landscape History about calendar GRACELAND CEMETERY people places news blog books contact donate Apostle of Taste connect Andrew Jackson Downing, APOSTLE OF TASTE 1815-1852 Andrew Jackson Downing NEW Edition David Schuyler Published by LALH Distributed by University of Massachusetts Press Paper $24.95 Forthcoming 2015 ISBN: 978-1-62534-000-0 Through his many books and in the pages of DAVID SCHUYLER the Horticulturist, the nation's first journal about landscape gardening, Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852) preached a gospel of taste, promoting a naturalistic style of landscape design as the "modern" alternative to the classical geometry of the "ancient" gardens of Italy and France. Together with his longtime collaborator, Alexander Jackson Davis, Downing also contributed to an architectural revolution that sought to replace the classical revival with the Gothic revival and other romantic styles. Downing celebrated this progression not simply as a change in stylistic preference but a reflection of the nation's evolution to a more advanced state of civilization. In this compelling biography, issued in a new edition with a new preface, David Schuyler explores the origins of the tastemaker's ideas in English aesthetic theory and his efforts to adapt English principles to American climate and republican social institutions. Tracing the impulse toward a native architectural style, Schuyler also demonstrates the influence of Downing's ideas on the period's gardens and, more broadly still, analyzes the complications of class implicit in Downing's prescriptions for American society. The new edition is illustrated with more than 100 drawings, plans, and photographs. "The vast amount of visual evidence combines with the material and personal history of Downing to make Apostle of Taste a must for scholars of architectural and landscape history." -Pennsylvania History "Schuyler's excellent study of Downing's writing and career, complete with excellent illustrations and an extensive, annotated bibliography, will serve as one major starting point for future studies of Downing." -Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture DAVID SCHUYLER is professor of American studies at Franklin and Marshall College. He is author of Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909; The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America; and A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1940- http://lalh.org/david-schuyler-apostle-of-taste/?utm_source=What%27s+New+Mailing&utm_campaign=ac18742ed7-News_November_3_2015&uf 1/2 Van Wyck Brooks. E.P. Dutton Co., 1944, 364 THE WORLD OF WASHINGTON IRVING INTO THE FORTIES 365 knights building their strongholds. But the Hudson remained the ings of Irving had fostered. But even here his principle was fitness to Hudson, in spite of all these efforts to turn it into a Tiber, A Thames use, adapting the house to the site and the character of the owner. He or a Rhine, which represented, for the rest, a growing and-general wrote much and well on cottages, simple or adorned, suggesting the tendency to humanize the beauty of the country. The banks were dotted substitution of soft and quiet shades of colour for the usual glaring everywhere with prospect towers on promontories, pavilions, fountains and positive reds and whites. The cottage ornée on the Hudson in Poe's conservatories, rustic bridges, willows that drooped over wrought iron The Sphinx was probably one of Andrew Jackson Downing's, for Poe, benches and summer-houses embellished with urns that realized the who was sensitive to most- of the movements of his time, was deeply "beauty of nature" or the "beauty of art." stirred by this new vogue of landscape-gardening and the landscape- These were the categories of Andrew Jackson Downing whose gardener. For his Ellison, in The Domain of Arnheim, "the creation of Treatise on Landscape Gardening appeared in 1841, while he distin the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent guished between the "beautiful," as revealed by Claude Lorrain, and of opportunities." It was "the richest, the truest, and most natural, if the "picturesque," according to Salvator Rosa. There was much of the not altogether the most extensive province" of "the poetic sentiment," rococo that later seemed absurd in Downing, but he spread a feeling and Ellison devoted himself and his fortune to the development of a for horticulture and gracious rural living in almost every corner of the domain that was like a dream of Böcklin or Arthur B. Davies. country.* In the South and around the older towns there had always Downing hoped to curb, he said, the spirit of unrest, the feverish, been charming country places, but Fanny Kemble had been struck by rootless, migratory habits of the country by developing local attach- the absolute absence of taste in most American rural dwellings of 1835 ments, security, repose and homes to which people would always wish They shocked her as they had shocked Cobbett in earlier days, The to cling. This, beyond a certain measure, was, at the time, a futile hope,* houses stood close to the roads for convenience, with straight, un for the mind of the nation was compelled or incited by forces that gravelled paths at best, straight rows of trees and straight box-borders, nothing could impede or counteract. Humanity as it were abhorred the and it seemed as if natural beauties were never taken advantage of vacuum of the continent, which it was driven to fill, and as long as a while defects were never hidden or adorned. Later, Fanny Kemble frontier existed the prevailing mood of Americans was bound to remain was equally struck by a contrast that was very largely due to the unsettled, fitful, restless. It was on the whole averse to any intensive influence of Downing. He had scattered a thousand fertile BUH cultivation, for the chances of the West distracted millions of minds. gestions in Rural Essays and other books, as well as in his own work For others in the older regions, however, and even in parts of the West along the Hudson, about the choosing of sites for houses, the arranjpi itself that had passed beyond the stress of pioneering, a moment of ment of flower-gardens and lawns, the planting of hedges and shade equilibrium arrived in the forties, a moment of national self-realization trees and the building of arbours. Born at Newburgh, where he lived, in which they looked on the world they had made, and, behold, this the son of a nurseryman there, he had been welcomed as a young man world was very good. They had settled a homeland which they loved with a passion for the river by the magnates along the eastern share and more and more delighted in,+ they had found what they took for a and he married one of John Quincy Adams's nieces; then, as an archi tect, he devised the "Hudson River Bracketed" style and encouraged A case in point was the fate of Cooper's house at Cooperstown. Cooper had carefully laid out there serpentine walks and miniature forests, and he cherished for taste for chalets, Tuscan villas and the "Rural Gothic" which the writ his father's house, which he had enlarged and "improved," the manorial associations "Under the snowy roofs of Concord in the Pilgrim State, as under the orangi of a country squire. Yet Otsego Hall was sold within a year of Cooper's death and and oak groves of South Carolina, I heard the same words,-'Mr. Downing has drop converted into a summer boarding-house. much for country." -Frederica Bremer, Homes of the New World. Miss Brenue About this time began the vogue of such books as The American Landscape, had corresponded with Downing before she arrived in America, and, visiting at his The Home Book of the Picturesque, Picturesque America, etc., two or three of which house at Newburgh, she drew from his work the first impressions that she recorded were edited by Bryant. The impulse that started with the Hudson River School led to in her well-known book. the so-called "Heroic School" of landscape, F. E. Church, a pupil of Cole, Bierstadt Fanny Kemble, Records of Later Life. and Thomas Moran, who painted the Sierras and the Rockies. By what must be regarded as a coincidence merely, George Inness was born in 10/28/2020 The Unveiling of A. J. Downing's Victorian Plan for Washington, D.C., 1851 The Book and Paper Group ANNUAL VOLUME NINE 1990 The American Institute for Conservation The Unveiling of A. J. Downing's Victorian Plan for Washington, D.C., 1851 By Heather Wanser Senior Paper Conservator, Conservation Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 This paper describes the examination and conservation of one of the treasures in the collections of the Library of Congress: a drawing by Andrew Jackson Downing entitled "Plan Showing Proposed Method of Laying Out the Public Grounds at Washington, February 1851," These "Public Grounds" in Downing's plan are today referred to as the Mall, the Nation's first formally landscaped public park. For years, curators in the Library's Geography and Map Division had pleaded with the Conservation Office to treat the plan because it was in such poor condition that it could not be viewed. The original paper substrate was disintegrating into dust, broken in hundreds of pieces held together by two linings, and silked on the front. Furthermore, there was considerable loss of image that was evidence of major damage to the surface from its last restoration. The combined condition and value of the original plan made the prospects of treatment daunting. I will review the problems and describe the experiments with enzymes and consolidants that led to a somewhat unusual treatment. But before I begin, I will present an historical perspective on this important artifact. The area of the Mall and how it was to be used has been a controversial issue from the very beginning. It was conceived with the first plan of the city. The site for our nation's capital, located at the confluence of the Potomac River and the Eastern Branch, was chosen by George Washington and approved by Congress in 1790. A year later, Pierre L'Enfant, a https://cool.culturalheritage.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v09/bp09-11.html 1/9 10/6/20 ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING Robert Twombly Judith K. Major. To Live in the New World: A.J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1997. ix + 242 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. David Schuyler. Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852. Balti- more and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xii + 290 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $39.95. It would be difficult to overstate the impact of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52) on American life during the middle decades of the nineteenth century By 1836, four years after he published (at age seventeen) the first of nearly seventy magazine articles on horticulture and rural life, his and his brother Charles' Botanical Gardens and Nursery in Newburgh, New York (where Downing was born and lived all his life), was SO well-known for the trees, plant material, and information it dispatched far and wide that it had become a mecca for traveling garden enthusiasts and was known even to English and French correspondents. Its fame and the knowledge on which it was based prompted him in 1841 to publish A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (revised 1844, 1849; regularly reissued during and after his lifetime), the first book on what is now called landscape architecture specifically to address American conditions. The book's acclaim encouraged Downing to take up landscape architecture professionally. During the next decades his ideas-the result of actual de- signs, on-site consultation, off-site response to client drawings, advice to friends and visitors, and taken from his writings-were implemented on rural estates and suburban plots from Maine to South Carolina and in the Middle West. Had he been able to implement his 1841 suggestions for what eighteen years later became the Boston Public Garden or his 1850 plan for "The Public Grounds" that fifty years later was landscaped as the Washington Mall, he would be recognized today as America's first urban park planner. And he was in a way, less because "The Public Grounds" was in small part executed (though later completely obliterated), more because his ideas Reviews in American History 26 (1998) 531-540 © 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press This content downloaded from 137.49.125.110 on Thu, 29 Oct 2020 14:38:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Presenting Nature: The Historec handscape ftabps: 1916 -Kit. Linder Hint llc Clelland Pachden. ignin would the subordinate development to natural character and scence value, adopting naturalistic adin form prestices of landscape design rooted in .15th-c. idea @ ladscape preservating harringation of built factures. form n minind discuption of natural topapaps. The ethec of design is as reedic Down's Tuature on the They t Puelic of Sanday (1841) was the student Averu gute fe to strend a appreciate of a native landocaf that an isherent sublem x pictarengue His lerity provided ii a philosophied basis for preseur arecian natural area ad ternolated the eder of "belldernes into Sessin terms, prinples that reflected th bedresp inteeds of 1. Hasettorne, W. sur, H.D. Thereou. x artists of the Hadoa leva School new averua He culturaled r an astaho appreciate of wild places. & dressy to certificate of "pleasure georeals" - C superfire dones, open meadires, winday paths, picturesque rochwork, restic budges, wooded Bach occured in second half of 19ec thank Imail A FLO. glades the transitive for pleasure groud to public Pioneers of American DOWNING, ANDREW JACKSON handscupe Design. (1815-1852) landscape gardener, horticulturist, author Charle Birnhaus Robin N4 i Mc.Graw-Hill, 2002 A. J. Downing was born in Newburgh, New York, the of American pomology. Its technical information on fruit fifth and youngest child of Samuel Downing, a wheel- nomenclature and thoughtful advice on planting and the wright turned nurseryman, and Eunice Bridge Downing. care of orchards attracted an enormous audience: Fruits On finishing schooling at the age of sixteen, Downing sold 15,000 copies before 1853, earned its author mem- joined his older brother Charles in managing the family bership in several European horticultural and scientific business, Botanic Garden and Nurseries. During the next societies, and, periodically updated by Charles Downing, decade he wrote dozens of articles for horticultural mag- remained in print throughout the rest of the century. azines and read extensively in the history and theory of During the 1840s, Downing also prepared American landscape design. editions of Jane Loudon's Gardening for Ladies (1843, As early as 1836, Downing had begun writing a book 1846) and George Wightwick's Hints to Young Architects on the use of trees in gardening, which was published in (1847), for whom he added an introductory chapter, 1841 as A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape "Additional Notes and Hints to Persons about Building in Gardening. In this book Downing rejected the classical This Country." styles prevalent in landscape and architectural design and Downing's final book, The Architecture of Country introduced American readers to the Beautiful and the Pic- Houses (1850), is both a culmination of his own views turesque, aesthetic categories that reflected the romantic on domestic architecture and a catalog of the works of movement evident in literature and art. The Treatise drew a rising generation of architects, including A. J. Davis, heavily on previous English works, most notably by Gervase Wheeler, and Richard Upjohn. In the preface Humphry Repton and John Claudius Loudon, but con- Downing attributed a moral and social influence to do- sciously "adapted" those ideas to the climate and republi- mestic architecture and asserted that a properly de- can social conditions of the United States. Although most signed home was "a powerful means of civilization." The of the book is devoted to descriptions of trees, advice on text presented plans for houses in Gothic, Romanesque, laying out grounds, and ornamental uses of water and stat- Italianate, Bracketed, and other styles, and explained uary, Downing also included a brief summary of the his- how each style and building type-cottage, farmhouse, torical evolution of styles in landscape design, analysis of the "beauties and principles of the art," and a chapter devoted to rural architecture. Gracefully written and handsomely illustrated, the Treatise became an immediate success; it went through four editions during the next twelve years and sold approximately 9,000 copies. The following year Downing published Cottage Res- idences, a series of designs for houses of modest size. This was the first of the new genre of house pattern books, which depicted the home in its landscaped setting and provided plans of the grounds and ornamental details, along with an explanatory text to assist the readers in choosing a residence appropriate to their circumstances. Several designs from Cottage Residences were reprinted in agricultural and horticultural periodicals in succeed- ing years, and numerous extant houses still testify to the popularity of the designs Downing presented in it. So great was the influence of these books, novelist Cather- ine Sedgwick reported, that "nobody, whether he be rich or poor, builds a house or lays out a garden without con- sulting Downing's works." Andrew Jackson Downing. Engraving by J. Halpin after Downing's third book, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of daguerreotype, C. 1852. Courtesy Shadek-Fackenthal Library, America (1845), proved to be a landmark in the history Franklin & Marshall College. ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING 97 on fruit and the : Fruits mem- ientific wning, entury. herican (1843, chitects hapter, ding in country views rks of Davis, reface to do- y de- "The sque, ained house, "Washington, D.C., The Projected Improvements." Lithograph by B.F. Smith Jr., 1852. Courtesy Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. villa-was appropriate to different settings and eco- important as matters of aesthetics: because he realized nomic situations. Downing also included chapters on the that farmers were wastefully extracting nutrients from treatment of interiors and furnishings. the soil and in older settled areas were experiencing Soon after delivering Architecture of Country Houses declines in productivity, Downing became one of the to its publisher in June 1850, Downing traveled to earliest advocates of publicly supported agricultural England. He returned to Newburgh in the fall accompa- education. In 1849 he was appointed one of eight com- nied by Calvert Vaux*, a young English architect, and missioners to develop a plan for an agricultural college shortly thereafter established a "Bureau of Architecture" and experimental farm in New York, which was never in a new wing he added to his home. Downing's firm pre- executed because of lack of legislative support. pared designs for several buildings and the extensive Living at the time when the urban population was grounds of Matthew Vassar's estate, Springside, in Pough- increasing at the fastest rate in American history, Down- keepsie, New York; the Daniel Parish house, Newport, ing also recognized the need for open spaces within cities Rhode Island; numerous residences in the vicinity of and advocated the creation of public parks. In 1848 he de- Newburgh; and the Dodge houses in Washington, D.C. scribed parks as the "pleasant drawing-rooms" of Euro- Downing's monthly magazine, The Horticulturist, pean cities, places that promoted a more democratic and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, commenced social life than was the case in the United States. In suc- ceeding years he elaborated on the role of parks as part of VIA'S publication in July 1846. In its pages Downing pro- moted the formation of village improvement societies a reformist program that also included publicly supported and advocated sensible yet tasteful designs in rural archi- libraries, galleries of art, and opportunities for social inter- tecture and landscape design. Rural economy was as action. 98 PIONEERS OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE DESIGN SPRINGSIDE Plan of Springside. From Benson J. Lossing, Vassar College and Its Founder, 1867. Courtesy Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. In late 1850, Downing was commissioned to plan communities that combined a spacious setting for sing! and superintend improvements to the public grounds in family homes and proximity to urban jobs and cultui Washington, D.C. This 150-acre tract extended west institutions. In his essay "Our Country Villages," Dow from the foot of Capitol Hill to the site of the Washing- ing rejected the rectangular plat SO common in most su ton Monument and then north to the President's House. urban development and advocated instead the curvir Downing saw this as an opportunity not simply to orna- lines that characterized his landscape designs. He als ment the capital but also to create the first large public proposed that each suburban community have a cer park in the United States. He believed that the Washing- trally located park, which would function as the "nucleu ton park would encourage cities across the nation to pro- or heart of the village" and provide opportunities fc vide healthful recreational grounds for their citizens. communal activities. Although only the initial stages of construction had been On July 28, 1852, at the peak of his professional completed at the time of his death, Downing's commis- accomplishments, Downing died in the burning of th sion, as well as the influence of his writings, earned him Hudson River steamboat Henry Clay near Yonkers. H the epithet "Father of American Parks." death, Harvard botanist Asa Gray noted, was "a trul Downing was also an early proponent of the suburb national loss." Downing achieved fame during his brie as a middle ground between city and country. He rec- life as a tastemaker to the nation. He guided the prevail ognized that railroads and other transportation tech- ing taste away from geometric patterns in the garden an nologies had made possible the creation of suburban classical styles in architecture to less formal picturesque 100 PIONEERS OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE DESIGN The Porter's Lodge, Springside, 1987. Photo Charles A. Birnbaum. or romantic designs. What united his various endeavors Press, 1997. Presents Downing's ideas of landscape was a recognition of the need to raise the level of "social gardening through analysis of the three editions of the civilization and social culture" in the United States. He Treatise as well as the essays he published in The Hor- considered his landscape and architectural commissions, ticulturist between 1846 and 1852. as well as his books and the pages of The Horticulturist, Schuyler, David. Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Down- vehicles for popularizing models of design appropriate ing, 1815-1852. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University to a middle-class society. Press, 1996. Contains a list of Downing's writings. Thousands of cottages and farmhouses, standing amid handsome trees and gardens, still display the cen- Tatum, George B., and Elisabeth B. MacDougall, eds. tral gable and veranda, ornamental brackets, and other Prophet with Honor: The Career of Andrew Jackson elements of residential design Downing popularized. Downing, 1815-1852. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Although few of the buildings and landscapes he himself Oaks / Trustees of Harvard University and the designed have survived, these anonymous homes and Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 1989. Scholarly papers landscapes are a fitting testament to his efforts to influ- presented at a symposium co-sponsored by the ence American taste. Athenaeum and the Center for Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks which analyze important aspects of Downing's career. Major, Judith K. To Live in the New World: A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening Cambridge: MIT David Schuyler DRAPER, EARLE SUMNER (1893-1994) landscape architect, planner Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, Earle Sumner Draper landscape architecture. He had worked one summer graduated from the Massachusetts Agricultural College with Albert Davis Taylor* and aspired to work with John (now the University of Massachusetts) with a degree in Nolen*. Frank Waugh*, professor of landscape garden-