Skip to navigation |

'A Secure Delight': Engravings of Landscape Gardens from Vitruvius Britannicus (1739)

Until 11 July 2008

In the Library Print Room

FREE

John Rocque (c.1704-1762), A Plan of the Gardens and View of the Buildings … at Esha [i.e. Esher], Surrey, 1737.
John Rocque (c.1704-1762), A Plan of the Gardens and View of the Buildings … at Esha [i.e. Esher], Surrey, 1737. Etching

This series of illustrated garden plans by the Huguenot-born landscape surveyor John Rocque (c.1704-1762) is the most important surviving visual record we have of the great aristocratic gardens of early 18th-century Britain.

They capture a key moment in garden history, revealing in a unique way how the painter-architect William Kent (1685-1748) and his patrons were laying the foundations of a new kind of landscape garden - arguably this country's most distinctive and widely-imitated contribution to the visual arts.

Opening times
10am-1pm, 2pm-5pm Tuesday to Friday
Closed Saturday to Monday