3 Both gardens and stage sets functioned as backcloths in front of which a story or a drama unfolded, and this long before the picturesque became paradigmatic for eighteenth-century gardening. The idea that a garden might provide a perfect setting in which one could represent human action was also closely related to the eighteenth-century understanding of the purpose and nature of stage scenery. In discussing Gardening, or ‘the Science of Landscape’, one should include a fourth sister: theatre. Horace Walpole, for instance, famously declared that ‘Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the science of Landscape, will forever by men of Taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn nature.’ 2 For this reason, the picturesque is still firmly rooted in the Ut pictura poesis-doctrine. Saying that a garden should be like a painting – Ut pictura hortus– means then that the picturesque garden should provide the perfect setting in which human action can be depicted, a viewpoint that ultimately comes to transform the garden into a silent poem. As garden theorist and historian John Dixon Hunt stated, ‘the term picturesque was originally used to refer to material that was suitable for inclusion in a painting or, by extension, material in the actual world that could be conceived of or viewed as if it were already part of a picture.’ 1 The use of the picturesque during the eighteenth century not only refers to landscape, but draws even more influentially on history painting, where the depiction of a human action is at stake. However, in reality the picturesque had a much wider relevance for the eighteenth-century garden. The picturesque vogue in eighteenth-century garden design is primarily understood today in the context of a close relationship at the time between landscape painting and gardening.
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