The Beautiful and the Picturesque

IN 1841 Wiley & Putnam published a book which soon brought its previously unknown writer international fame, and which, before it had spent its force, radically altered the American scene.* The author was Andrew Jackson Downing, a landscape gardener of Newburgh, New York, then only twenty-six years old; the book bore the rather formidable title of A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America-hardly a topic which might have been expected to elicit much popular enthusiasm from the American people, then or now. Yet so interesting and useful did Downing contrive to make his subject that not only were four editions of the Treatise required during his lifetime, but six more appeared after his death, the last in 1921. As the New York journalist, Clarence Cook, later remarked, perhaps never in the field of literature had so young a man met with so sudden and extended a reputation.' Heartened by his initial success, Downing the following year brought out a second, though smaller, work devoted entirely to the question of rural architecture (a subject which had occupied only a chapter of the Treatise). This he called simply Cottage Residences, and while its popularity never equaled the Treatise on Landscape Gardening, its success justified the publication in 1850 of a larger volume on The Architecture of Country Houses. Unlike the earlier Builders' Guides which had stressed structural details often best suited to important

Art · Art history · American Environmental and Regional History · Landscape and Cultural Studies