Sir Roy Strong, now in his sixties, has long been a cultural pioneer and celebrity, returning undervalued areas of British art back to the mainstream, and engendering a sense of style while, successively, director of the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has published solidly on Tudor portraiture, miniatures and 19th-century British history painting, subjects that had little audience at the time. He has also been a garden columnist and created his own formal garden, The Laskett Garden, in Herefordshire and, more recently, an Italianate one for Elton John.
He now returns to gardens in print, with a history of the depiction of British gardens from the Tudor court to the early 19th century, and what this tells us, not just about their contents, but those who commissioned them and their intentions. He retraces some of the material of The Renaissance Garden in England (1979), another revelation of lost culture, and John Harris's The Artist and the Country House (1972), to which he pays tribute, but his own book reflects new research and much-improved book presentation. As he notes, collections have been "ransacked" for images of historic gardens since interest in them revived during the 1980s. This is, however, the fullest overall account yet. The quality of images is outstanding and the use of large colour details often makes telling points.
There is distinct pleasure in visiting in this book the former sunken garden at Pierrepont House, Nottingham, with its flowerbeds and statuary, or the terraces at Wollaton Hall, which now stands in isolated splendour. Even where parts remain, like the turf amphitheatre at Claremont, Surrey (National Trust), or pots have been replaced - in the Orange Garden at Chiswick House - the important role of details such as garden seats or peacocks is underlined by the artist's record. Strong warns, however, that certain features do not seem to have been thought worthy of inclusion in the various paintings by the patrons who commissioned them. There can also be artistic licence, and even the painting from 1995 by Jonathan Myles-Lea of Strong's own garden has inaccuracies. Perhaps to avoid the usual chronology of garden histories, there are five sections, though this does involve some repetition of much-depicted gardens. Strong is on familiar territory with the emergence of the painted view in Tudor art. His masterful analysis of the Great Garden of Whitehall Palace, included as a minor backdrop in The Family of Henry VIII is one of many in the book. While intended to show off one's possession, the garden was to remain secondary to the portrait until the 1740s, when Arthur Devis is singled out for the 20 actual ones included in his small-scale portraits.
The symbolism inherent in Tudor and Stuart gardens, with reference to emblems and devices, forms a second section. What seems just another garden behind Isaac Oliver's suave Unknown Young Man is actually a worldly foil for his melancholia (substantiated by engravings). From often abstruse garden readings, there is the more familiar area of the view painter. In England, a great deal is owed to anonymous painters and the panoramas that Jan Siberechts and Peter Tillemans found themselves forced to paint. There is also the invaluable bird's-eye engraved record of estates by Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, published as volumes of Brittania Illustrata.
The eighteenth century has so many important gardens that the book has to be selective, with lengthy pieces on Stowe and Chiswick House, but brief mentions of other famous ones like Stourhead. The book underlines how the modern idea of "garden rooms" can be traced back to this period. The shortest section looks at the English park, where "dull" Capability Brown (Strong has long been a critic) destroyed so much of what had existed, including recent work by William Kent and Charles Bridgeman, whose reputations are on the rise. The fugitive nature of gardening is underlined by the visual material and is a reminder of the passions engendered by threats to historic gardens and parks in Ireland, like Carton and Mount Congreve.
Some readers may wish for more on the floral element of earlier gardens. Even with Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, it is his own strident views on gardening that are quoted and not his comment to Horace Mann that the garden "is to be nothing but riant, and the gaiety of nature". He also rightly forecast that 150 years hence it would be as common to transplant an old oak, as a tulip, for an immediate effect.
Adrian Le Harivel is curator of British and Dutch paintings at the National Gallery of Ireland, and lecturer on historic houses and gardens. He has written the 2001 Gallery diary on the theme of flowers and gardens