Chiswick House
The Chiswick House is a Palladian style building in the London borough of Chiswick with revolutionary gardens, which Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1695-1753) had created by William Kent .
Burlington was a patron (he also sponsored George Frideric Handel ) and a dilettante who dealt with architecture. He planned his villa based on the model of the Villa Rotonda in Vicenza , built by Andrea Palladio around 1566, and realized it between 1720 and 1730. The house was not suitable for everyday devices, it was “too small to live in and too big to hang it on a watch chain, ”as contemporary John Hervey scoffed. Chiswick was no ordinary house, it was an architectural declaration of intent, moreover only the extension of the actual country house, which has not been preserved.
Burlington wanted to counter the culture of French absolutism , which dominated Europe, and found his role models in Italy ( Andrea Palladio ) and England ( Inigo Jones , who propagated Palladio's architectural conception as early as the 17th century but did not gain acceptance - it was only Burlington who helped with the Palladian Revival his breakthrough ideas).
The garden at Chiswick was laid out in 1715, with Alexander Pope helping with advice. After the completion of the new villa in 1729, a new system was started, this time the young painter William Kent, whom Burlington had met in Italy and employed for the interior, helped. Together they studied ancient descriptions of gardens, for example by Pliny , and tried to get closer. Columns and sculptures (e.g. from ancient poets), temples and a bagnio completed the picture. The Bollo Brook , which formed the boundary of the garden until 1726, came into the garden through land purchases and served to supply lakes and wells with water.
But Kent went even further: the quote from antiquity did not adequately express the spirit of freedom; in his opinion, the symmetrical garden spaces had to be released from their rigid, strict forms. With this, Kent formulated the basic principle of the English landscape garden for the first time and later became one of the pioneers of the gardening revolution.
In 1966 the Beatles filmed two music videos for Paperback Writer and Rain in the garden.
literature
- Hans von Trotha: The English landscape garden. A journey through its history . Wagenbach, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-8031-1180-3 ( Salto 81 (recte: 80)).
- John Dixon Hunt: The Picturesque Garden. Design and history of the European landscape garden . Verlag Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 2004. ISBN 3-8001-4494-8 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bollo Brook on London's Lost Rivers.
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 29 ′ 1 ″ N , 0 ° 15 ′ 31 ″ W.