Notes and Reviews 
T HE death of Frederick Law Olmsted at 
the age of eighty-one years closed a 
period of retirement from that active work 
by which he will always be remembered. 
With his career the profession of landscape 
architect in America may be said to have 
begun, for his predecessor, the circumscribed 
Downing, achieved little but to rouse the 
desire for that which Mr. Olmsted was 
called upon later to create. So inchoate 
were these wants in a country whose esthetic 
progress had scarce begun that there was no 
established course by which a lover of natu¬ 
ral beauty could prepare himself for the 
profession with which it deals. Even had 
there been one, it is doubtful whether Fred¬ 
erick Law Olmsted would have entered upon 
it, for it was not until well along in years 
that he turned to his life work. 
Born in 1822 at Hartford, Ct., and after 
studying at Phillips Academy, he entered 
an importing house in New York City. 
After a voyage to the far East, he studied 
engineering at Yale, and later determined to 
become a farmer. At that occupation he 
settled in Connecticut and afterward on 
Staten Island. Soon he was off again jour¬ 
neying afoot in great Britain and on the 
Continent. Three years later he made a 
horseback tour of the Southern States and 
chronicled his observations in several books 
which enjoyed, in their day, no small measure 
of popularity and favorable literary remark. 
On account of their bearing upon the slave 
question and other economic topics, they 
caused their author to be first known as a 
publicist; and the active interest he retained 
in public affairs not only placed him upon 
several important humanitarian commissions 
during the period of the Civil War but it 
gave him an immediate grasp of the public 
problems he was called upon to solve in his 
purely professional work. 
It was not until 1856 that he entered 
upon this work and by fortuitous circum¬ 
stances. After a chance meeting with one 
of the Commissioners for the creation of 
Central Park, New York, he associated with 
himself his friend Calvert Vaux and sub¬ 
mitted a plan for the Park which was selected 
as the best of thirty-two competitive designs. 
This work brought rapid fame to Olmsted, 
and cities invited him to design their parks, 
individuals their private grounds. Boston, 
Washington, Chicago, Brooklyn, Montreal, 
St. Louis, Buffalo, Detroit, Trenton and 
Bridgeport owe to his genius much of the 
beauty of their public tracts. All of this 
work created in the Brookline office a veritable 
center of the landscape art, from which came 
Codman, who carried out his master’s ideas 
for the Chicago World’s Fair, and Eliot, 
whose great work in beautifying the vicinity 
of Boston was ended by untimely death. In 
1872 Frederick Law Olmsted was the presi¬ 
dent of the New York Department of Parks 
and three years afterward the landscape archi¬ 
tect of that city where later he directed the 
construction of Riverside and Morningside 
Parks and the arrangement of the territory 
north of the Harlem River. He received 
from Harvard, Yale and Amherst the degree 
of Master of Arts and afterward that of 
LL.D. from Harvard and Yale. 
Though Mr. Olmsted was not a formalist 
he spent no energy in decrying the tenets of 
what might be called the “ architectural 
school ” of landscape art. His works repre¬ 
sent rather the silent opposition. Many 
of these necessarily bore an intimate relation 
to architectural surroundings, but these sur¬ 
roundings he considered artificial and beyond 
the purpose of his art to simulate. All of 
his work is therefore conspicuously natural¬ 
istic ; and after the city-bound conditions 
under which Central Park was conceived, we 
can fancy his pleasure at turning to the vast 
tracts of the Yosemite which he was to pre¬ 
serve for public use when he became the 
first Commissioner of the National Park. 
The preservation of natural beauty and 
the accentuation of its best effects was his 
instinctive mode of treatment, showing it¬ 
self, in the case of city parks, by a sudden 
transition to Nature, and in country estates 
by a wisely planned and immediate develop¬ 
ment of the more favorable opportunity. 
He preferred trees and shrubs to flowers, 
and with the former obtained those effects 
of mass and vista which must have im¬ 
pressed themselves upon younger mind 
while a-journey in foreign lands or tilling his 
fields at Saybrook then little thinking he 
was destined to be a master of that art which 
places the noblest materials of Nature at the 
greatest service of Man. 
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