Sculpture and the Garden

Although the integration of sculpture in gardens is part of a long tradition dating back at least to antiquity, the sculptures themselves are often overlooked, both in the history of art and in the history of the garden. This collection of essays considers the changing relationship between sculpture and gardens over the last three centuries, focusing on four British archetypes: the Georgian landscape garden, the Victorian urban park, the outdoor spaces of twentieth-century modernism and the late-twentieth-century sculpture park. Through a series of case studies exploring the contemporaneous audiences of gardens, the book uncovers the social, political and gendered messages revealed by sculpture's placement and suggests that the garden can itself be read as a sculptural landscape.

Contents: Preface, Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell; Part 1 The Georgian landscape garden and Victorian urban park: Introduction, Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell; Studley Royal: landscape as sculpture, Glynis Ridley; The king in the garden: royal statues and the naturalization of the Hanoverian Dynasty in early Georgian Britain, 1714-1760, Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau; Sex, gender, politics: the Venus de Medici in the eighteenth-century landscape garden, Wendy Frith; Marginal figures: public statues and public parks in the Manchester region, 1840-1914, Terry Wyke; The meaning and re-meaning of sculpture in Victorian public parks, David Lambert; Part 2 Modernism, postmodernism, landscape and regeneration: Introduction, Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell; Henry Moore's Recumbent Figure, 1938, at Bentley Wood, Alan Powers; Modern sculpture in the public park: a Socialist experiment in open-air 'cultured leisure', Robert Burstow; Modernism out of doors: Barbara Hepworth's garden, Chris Stephens; 1977 - A walk across the park, into the forest, and back to the garden: the Sculpture Park in Britain, Joy Sleeman; Naturalizing Neoclassicism: Little Sparta and the public gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Patrick Eyres; Bibliography; Index.

Patrick Eyres is editor of the New Arcadian Journal, UK. Fiona Russell is a freelance writer and editor.