Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer: A Landscape Critic in the Gilded Age

摘要

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer (1851-1934) was a scion of New York's elite who forged a career as arguably the most significant art and architectural critic of the second half of the nineteenth century. Frederick Law Olmsted ranked her with Charles Sprague Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard and conductor of Garden and Forest, along with William A. Stiles, managing editor of that journal, as the best writers on landscape architecture and the most successful in explaining his goals as a designer to the public (Olmsted to Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., September 5, 1890, Olmsted Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress). Van Rensselaer is a complex figure-wealthy, sophisticated, wide ranging in her writing about the arts, and a committed social and educational reformer, yet she was also opposed to women's suffrage. She lost her husband, Schuyler, and son Gris, early in their respective lives, yet with tenacity and intelligence established her place in the New York literary and art world. Her biography, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (1888), written at the strong encouragement of Olmsted and Sargent, is the first modern biography of an American architect. Judith Major's welcome study, less a much needed biography of Van Rensselaer than a sustained analysis of her writings on landscape gardening, portrays her as "a lady and a professional critic at the same time" and promises to "explain this seeming contradiction" (p. 3).