4TO THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



looks forward to the day when the profession of 'landscape 

 gardener,' which he thinks rather unhappily named, (and it is 

 even less appropriate now than seventy years ago), would be ' more 

 closely united wdth the fine arts,' and believes that 'a certain 

 number of real landscapes, executed by men adequate to set the 

 example of a new school, which shall reject the tame and pedantic 

 rules of Kent and Brown, without affecting the grotesque or 

 fantastic — who shall bring back more ornament into the garden, 

 and introduce a bolder, wilder, and more natural character into 

 the park, would awaken a general spirit of emulation.' Are there 

 not such men and women at work in the garden now' on these 

 lines — painting pictures with Nature's own canvas, forms and 

 colours? But the time has, happily, not yet come to include 

 them in an historical sketch. 



Antoine Watteau's 'Bosquet de Bacchus' is an instance of 

 a garden that descends lineally from no school and cannot be 

 called representative of any style, except that of Watteau himself — 

 * le style c'est I'homme meme.' 



Architecture, aided by sculpture, has been taken as the type of 

 one kind of garden design. Painting of another ; may we not say 

 of Watteau that he represents the Music of gardens? And as 

 we see him, in his own portrait, palette in hand, standing behind 

 his friend. Monsieur de Julienne, who holds his violoncello 

 between his knees, with music-book upon the turf; and in 

 the background a statue canopied by that 'tree-architecture, of 

 which those moss-grown balustrades, terraces, statues, fountains 

 are really accessories ' ; or as we gaze upon the groups in his 

 ' Fetes Galantes ' ' half in masquerade playing the drawing- 

 room or garden comedy of life,'^ and seem to hear the music of 

 lutes and viols, the murmur of falling waters and waving boughs, 

 we feel that here at last we have realised the ideal garden, 'the 

 chosen landscape,' the perfect fusion of Art with Nature, that' 



1 Walter Pater, ' A Prince of Court Painters* (Imaginary Portraits). 



I 



