It’s hard to imagine the garden of a grand stately home without a statue or three. Indeed these days even modest gardens like mine have a well placed bust or figure to add a touch of class to the surroundings.  Yet that’s not always been the case.

Statues were a standard part of grand gardens of the classical world but thereafter seem to have disappeared from the garden scene until the Renaissance, and they don’t seem to have made much of an appearance in English gardens until the early 17thc.

It was the Grand Tour that really showed elite Georgian tourists what they were missing, and, on their return from Italy laden down with what the poet Thomas Gray called  “storied urn or animated bust”,  to put in their gardens enabling them  to show off their classical learning.  In the process these statues, columns, urns and other such features  completely changed the character of the English garden.

But is it just show off classical learning? Perhaps that was the 18thc reason but these days surely not – would most garden visitors  know one classical deity or hero from another?

As Gardening is usually a matter of Man imposing order on Nature  are garden ornaments like statues just an extension of that – another way  of giving humans control of the artificial worlds we try to create in our gardens? In that case why do glistening white figures often look out of place whereas others weathered or covered in lichen or moss look quite at home?  Maybe it could be because secretly we quite like the fact that if we give Nature half a chance it’s quick to take back control and subvert our best plans.

And it’s not just the modern observer who might think that: in November 1644John Evelyn reported seeing “a row balustr’d with white marble, on which are erected divers statues and heads, covered over with the natural shrubbs, Ivys & other perennial Greenes, as in niches” at the Villa Medici in Rome.

Perhaps the first garden in the post-classical world to re-introduce statuary was created for the  great papal patron of the arts Julius II in the opening years of the 16thc.  The  Belvedere court in the Vatican Designed by Bramante  was originally lined with excavated classical statues from Julius’s collection  which included now famous pieces such as the “Apollo Belvedere”…

…the “Hercules and Antaeus”, and the “Laocoön and His Sons”.  Such statues evoked the great stories of antiquity retold in the “rediscovered” poetry of Ovid and  Virgil, and which, alongside Christian stories, dominated the cultural world. Yet while Christian scenes filled canvases on the walls  inside alongside those of the pagan world, outside in the garden  it was a different story: there mythology won hands down.

Meanwhile rather than classical statues of early Renaissance Italy  the Tudor Royal gardens in England were  furnished with  the painted wooden and stone statues of heraldic royal beasts which I’ve written about before.  Classical statues and other antiquities don’t make much of an appearance in the garden until much later, when they are usually associated with travels to Italy with the most notable early imports being those thought to be bought back by Lord Lumley who had been sent on an embassy to Florence in the 1560s and which were latter recorded  in the Lumley Inventory in 1590.  They included the marble columns, obelisks and fountains recorded in the grounds of the palace of Nonsuch which he had acquired from the crown in 1580.

Amongst them was a statue of Diana which stood on top of a fountain, which was seen by a local clergyman, Anthony Watson, who wrote a description of it in 1582: “On the top of this tiny mound is set a shining column which carries a high-standing statue of a snow-white nymph, perhaps Venus, from whose tender breasts flow jets of water into the ivory-coloured marble, and from there the water falls down through narrow pipes into marble basins.”   The plinth has recently been identified at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire   where it was taken by a later owner.

But the one man who can be said to have influenced the introduction of Italian garden style into Britain in the early 17thc  must be Inigo Jones.  His first trip to Italy was at the behest of a rich patron at the very beginning of the 17thc, – I wonder if he saw the Belvedere Court or other gardens where antiquities were displayed. Certainly John Evelyn  about 40 years later reported seeing  not only the Belvedere with its statues but amongst other gardens those of the Villa Borghese with its “infinity of rare statues, Altars and Urnes”

In 1613 Inigo Jones had been appointed Surveyor of the Kings Works and later that year he made another trip to Europe accompanying Lord Lumley’s great-nephew Thomas Howard, the earl of Arundel, better known as the Collector Earl.  They had gone as part of the entourage for Princess Elisabeth who was to marry Frederick the Elector Palatine – and later became the Winter Queen to his Winter King. After delivering the princess to Heidelberg they travelled on to Italy where they stayed well over a year.  They returned to England through France stopping at Paris where, as will see,  Jones made another important connection.  Howard bought back a large haul of antiquities, including a large number of Roman statues some of which he displayed some inside Arundel House,  in a gallery which overlooked the river, while others were put up in and around  the garden.  This was almost certainly done with the advice of Inigo Jones who was also tasked with remodelling the house.

Such continental innovations were  not to everyone’s taste.  They served no purpose and were  too ostentatious  according to Francis Bacon who ends  his famous essay “On Gardens” published in 1625 with the sentence “But it is nothing for great princes, that for the most part taking advice with workmen, with no less cost set their things together; and sometimes add statuas and such things for state and magnificence, but nothing to the true pleasure of a garden.”    But at least Bacon had a sense of humour where statues were concerned. One day he visited Arundel House, and on going  into the garden “where there were a great number of Ancient Statues of naked Men and Women,” he  “made a stand and as astonished, cryed out, “The Resurrection”.  (From Thomas Tenison, Baconiana, 1679)

It may  not have been Lord Arundel who started the fashion for garden statues. And it almost certainly wasn’t him who introduced non-classical subjects.   According to John Aubrey it was Bacon’s friend “Sir John Danvers of Chelsey”, who  “first taught us the way of Italian gardens. He had well travelled France and Italy and made good observations … He had a very fine fancy, which lay chiefly for gardens and architecture.” Danvers was an MP and courtier  later turned a strong supporter of Cromwell,  and his Chelsea home,  Danvers House, built in 1622-23 was  next door to the former residence of   Sir Thomas More. Aubrey was later to sketch the garden and write a lengthy description of the house and garden. There is also a Johannes Kip engraving showing the gardens [but not the house] over 40 years after Danvers death  when it was in the hands of his daughter. Roy Strong believes that very little of the layout had changed but there appears to be no sign of the statues  that are known to have been there, and which we’ll come on to shortly.  It’s lucky that Kip got there when he did because just a few years later in 1695 the house was pulled down and the garden built over as Danvers Street was erected in its place.

After describing the shrubs, flowering and fruit trees growing in what he called the boscage  Aubrey says that “at the west end was the figure of the Gardiners wife in freestone coloured: at the east end of the Gardiner’s the like: both accoutred according to their calling.” Elsewhere he added “I have spoken of the excellence of the two great figures on Pedestalls and of their Passions, attested by that great Master in Painting Seignior Vario.” [Antonio Verrio]

What’s particularly worth noting and might surprise you, is that the statues of the gardener and his wife were not “plain” stone  as would be expected today but painted in lifelike colours which would have altered the whole “feel” of both them and their setting.  [Of course this would have been the case in the classical world too, but unpainted was sometimes preferred in the Renaissance as showing the superiority of form over colour, as shown in a readable article by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker ]

Clearly the Gardener and his wife were not classical gods or heroes but nor were some of   the other statues that Danvers is known to have installed.  Aubrey goes on: “To this Ovall Bowling-green are four Avenues: East West North and South: at each of which are two figures opposite exquisitely cutt in Freestone by Mr George Stone.”

 

Three of these avenues had a pair of statues on opposite sides of  “the entrance to the Ovall-green where Mr Stone hath not only outdone himself in the symettrie, proper accoutrements &.”  Each pair comprised “a  faithful Shepherd” and “a faithfull shepherdesse” but each pair was different, one an old couple, another young and the third set were reclining. They came variously equipped with “Sheep-crooke, Dog, Sheep-marke.. .and baskets of flowers but likewise, in his expressing Love-passions in the very freestone.”  Unfortunately as far as I can see there are no surviving figures of this kind and no images of Stone’s work either.

They might not have been antiquities from Olympus or Rome but, said Aubrey, they had “rustick beauty mixt with antique  innocent simplicities” and “the honestest innocent countenances that can be imagined which yet remain after seventy years.”

I wondered where the idea had come from – it certainly carries echos of Arcadia which was a theme pursued by Inigo Jones in his court masques and which was to inspire slightly later painters like Poussin, but I also wondered if Danvers had seen similar things in Italy – certainly John Evelyn on his visit in October 1644 noted in his diary seeing  the Palazzo Negrone at Genoa  where he saw ”a grove of stately trees, furnish’d with artificial Sheepe, Shepheards & Wild Beasts, so naturally cut in a grey-stone… that you would imagine your selfe in a Wilderness & Silent Country, side-ways in the heart of a great Citty.”

To complete the quartet of statues  on the south side were, perhaps surprisingly a pair of Sphinx. These symbolised the search for ancient wisdom and were a continuation of an  Egyptian theme which began with the entrance to the garden which was through a gateway flanked by “two spacious elegant Pyramides of brick faced with stone, “about twenty four foot high”.  On either side of the Sphinx were figures representing Hercules and Antaeus, and Cain and Abel.  Perhaps it’s no wonder then that Francis Bacon despite his reservations about statues  “took much delight in that elegant Garden at Chelsey.”

For the full description of Danvers Chelsea garden see A Life of George Herbert, by Amy Charles, 1977

Danvers also  later had a second home, at Lavington  in the Wiltshire countryside the property of his first  wife Magdalene Herbert who was related to the Earl of Pembroke, of nearby Wilton.   He laid the gardens  out  there in the Italian style too, although we are not fortunate enough to have a proper description.  There is a five acre walled garden but no trace otherwise of Danvers work, although the current owners have established a splendid garden which featured in Country Life in 2023 and which is open for the National Gardens Scheme.

Earlier I said that Inigo Jones had made an important connection when he had stayed in Paris.  This was Hubert le Sueur who is thought to have trained with the great  Italian sculptor Giambologna.  The two must have hit it off because later Jones recommended Le Sueur to the Prince of Wales, later Charles I, perhaps after the future king had seen the gardens of  Danvers and Arundel.   Certainly Charles seemed enthusiastic about antique statues and decided he wanted a copy of the famous statue of The Gladiator in the Villa Borghese. This had only been discovered comparatively recently in the ruins of one of Nero’s palaces  and had been acquired by Cardinal Scipione Borghese to form the centrepiece of his art collection.

 

Its fame soon spread and Le Sueur cast a copy in bronze for Charles which was placed in the gardens of Whitehall Palace.  He made another copy which was installed in the parterre at Wilton  by Isaac de Caus for the earl of Pembroke.  This piece was later to be given to Robert Walpole and can be seen in the Great Hall at Houghton, where you can also see a copy of Laocoon. Other versions of The Gladiator can be found at Knole and Petworth while the one in the gardens at Chatsworth was originally in Lord Burlington’s garden at Chiswick.

 

In 1631 Le Sueur was commissioned by Charles to travel back to Italy and take moulds or casts  of other classical pieces to put in the garden of St James Palace.

One of these is the bronze figure of Diana now on the fountain in Bushy Park.

This burst of royal interest may well have been the spur to English sculptors like Nicholas Stone to also start making statues of classical deities, some of which can still be seen at Wilton where they ornamented not only the elaborate formal gardens but also the grotto designed by de Caus.

There’s one problem with marble or other stone statues in gardens and that’s the practical one of protecting them from the English weather, especially in winter. Evelyn was  ever down to earth about things like this  and  noticed that even in Italy marble artworks had to be protected in winter as at the Belvedere where  the “incomparable statues” … “are for defense against the Weather shut up in their Neeches with dores of Wainscot”.  Yet as his contemporary and fellow garden writer John Worlidge pointed out one of the reasons for having statues was for “Winter diversion… to recompense the loss of past pleasures, and to buoy up hope of another Spring.”

If you want to know more about the issues around protecting the marble and other stone statues in your garden then it’s worth looking at Historic England’s advice.

If marble statues were too vulnerable to leave outside in the winter and  stone also suffered the effects of weather what else could be used to make garden ornaments?  Le Sueur turned to bronze but this was far too expensive  for most people’s pockets which might explain why the French garden writer Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville suggested  in 1712 that “statues are not for every man, but princes and great ministers.” But interest in gardens and gardening was spreading down the social hierarchy and so to meet this new demand  sculptors and garden makers instead turned  to lead as their preferred material and I’ll take a look at what that meant next week.