British witnesses to the destruction of the Emporer's Summe Palace remembered the gardens, not the architecture, which were reminiscent of the English landscape gardens of William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
This would have been less of a surprise to English observers had they understood that Kent and Brown had borrowed from the Chinese appreciation of irregularity and naturalism in garden design which had first reached England in the late 17th Century, via Dutch traders and English diplomats in Holland
this later came to be known as the Picturesque, a style much appreciated by the Directors of the East India Company, some of whom would have been familiar with the villa gardens on the islands facing Canton, and who commissioned Repton in 1806 to design the gardens for the EIC college at Haileybury
Comments