A World of Gardens by John Dixon Hunt

Author:John Dixon Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

149 A corridor along the side of the Humble (or Artless) Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou.

Other cultures, too, have drawn upon a variety of arts – literary and painterly – for the establishment and description of their gardens, as for instance in the naming of temples in eighteenth-century English landscapes, where some skill was needed to read and interpret classical allusions, or the alliance of gardener and architect for the late nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts garden. But this collaboration is infinitely more intense and rich in Chinese scholar gardens, and this was especially true in the late Ming (1573–1644). The collaboration may also be true of Imperial creations, but they were less written about than those of the literati, whose popularity was marked by very personal links among artists, writers and their families. And beyond even this collaboration between calligraphy, paintings and poetry in the making of gardens is the fashion in which gardens were necessarily observed through the lens of these various and allied arts. The Chinese garden was essentially mediated. References even to paintings of actual sites may have been gleaned largely from texts on landscape painting rather than from studying the sites themselves, though this changed somewhat in the late imperial period with the publication of pictorial albums.2

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