17th - 19th Century European Garden Plans

Opening August 19 and running through September 13, 2004, The Drawing Room in East Hampton is pleased to present "17th-19th Century European Garden Plans". Organized chronologically from 1686–1910, the exhibition documents landscape design for private, public and even royal gardens, with a focus on French gardens because of their strong impact on the history of landscape design. From the ordered, geometric formal plan to the “natural,” picturesque gardens imported from England in the mid-eighteenth century, through to the adaptations of private landscape design for the new public spaces of the modern era, these unusual works on paper trace changing conceptual tastes. An essay by landscape historian Eleanor M. McPeck accompanies the exhibition.

This exhibition offers insight into the evolving influences and conventions in the design and use of gardens over three centuries and highlights the different techniques of recording the landscape - and the follies therein - through drawing more generally. The range of plans on view reveals that utilitarian concerns in landscape - such as the agrarian use of fields, the legal surveying of land for taxes, and the traffic patterns of hunting parties and pleasure strolls through forests - remained inextricably linked to aesthetic considerations of the design and its recording on paper.

See below for full press release and selected works.