Prints and the Landscape Garden : Image, Illusion, Illumination

Author : Michael Symes

This book considers what prints tell us about the development of the landscape garden in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. They formed a significant part of the expanding machinery of mass communication and could thus influence taste and spread ideas. This can be interpreted as propaganda, or at least creation of an image the owner of a property found desirable, and reality was consequently often compromised.  The illusion of actuality could be achieved by adjustments and techniques employed by artists generally. 

Even if not entirely representational, a print may reveal much about fashions and attitudes towards the landscape garden. At their best they powerfully convey the atmosphere of a garden as well as the perception and possible idealisation of it. The book breaks new ground, discussing the techniques of producing a print, the marketing employed, various categories of print, and studies of the greatest engravers and a few select gardens which prints illuminate particularly well.  Changes can be observed both in the developments in print-making and in the journey of the landscape garden.

This is the first book to be published which demonstrates the development of printmaking alongside that of the landscape garden, and is generously illustrated with prints of the period both in monochrome and colour.      

Publication – January 2024      

240 pages, 220 x 280mm landscape format, with over 200 illustrations in colour and monochrome

ISBN 978-1-7398229-6-5 Hard cover £50 ($75)

ISBN 978-1-7398229-8-9 PDF Ebook £19.99 ($29.95)