THE LIMITS OF BROWN'S LANDSCAPE: TRANSLATIONS OF THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN INTO IRELAND

摘要

Lancelot Brown's design vocabulary proved very popular in late eighteenth-century Ireland with many great houses surrounded by rolling lawns, sinuous tree belts and twisting approach routes. The relatively flat counties around Dublin found his abilityto make lakes, position bridges and plant great broadleaf trees highly covetable. Yet his impact is perhaps most gloriously revealed in the lighter legacy that his aesthetic bestowed upon landscapes already possessed of great natural advantages, such asthose of Ireland's lakelands and river valleys. With the hand of nature as the greater creative force, his gift to Ireland lay in how his vocabulary heightened their natural advantages and made them easier to appreciate. In Brown's English landscapes, the view and perception from within to without could be composed with aesthetic insouciance. Further afield, designers were not so secure in thinking that the opposing view posed little danger of aesthetic and ideological collapse. Areas of the landscapegarden's aesthetic that proved difficult in translation include the design of vistas, boundaries, circulation routes and massed planting. Yet Brown's influence in presenting the beauties of the Irish landscape to both natives and newcomers is not insubstantial and may yet be appreciated in Ireland.