Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852

The AAG Review OF BOOKS Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 David Schuyler. Amherst, MA: socializing benefit that shaped U.S. University of Massachusetts landscape taste in ways we still value. Press, 2015. xxii and 290 pp., illustrations, appendices, notes, Downing wanted to influence a demo- bibliography, index. $24.95 paper cratic civil society through an intel- (ISBN 978-1-62534-168-6). lectual and moral middle-class aes- thetic, and design a landscape that Reviewed by Joseph S. Wood, would bring antebellum Americans Departments of History and across social classes together. Still to- Public Affairs, University of day, U.S. small towns and villages, and even an occasional farmscape, exhibit Baltimore, Baltimore, MD. nineteenth-century Downing-inspired English or Italianate-styled houses, and sometimes a classical vernacular Why would geographers wish to read form festooned with a gothic gable or an assessment of the work of ante- board-and-batten siding and brack- bellum U.S. landscape gardener and eted overhangs. Early elite watering architect Andrew Jackson Downing? holes, such as Newport, Rhode Island, Today we take “landscaping” for exhibit relict mansions and gardens, granted, and in much of the United likewise inspired by Downing’s vision States we hire “landscapers,” often immigrants and day of taste and refinement, albeit in his simplified, Ameri- laborers, to maintain for us what in the 1840s was a can adaptation. So, too, do urban parks and suburbs that new and exciting vision. That vision has led to a wide- eschew the grid. Quite simply, if one wishes to read and spread vernacular form of lawns and gardens, albeit make sense of today’s U.S. middle-class landscape, one adapted to local environmental opportunities, with needs to understand Downing’s vision and how well and houses sited back from tree-lined and often curvilinear widely it was employed. When we interpret the landscape streets. Downing, substantially through his writing and through a remote sensing lens or build geographic in- proselytizing, if not materially through commissions, formation system platforms to display the landscape, or shaped this vision and applied what in the nineteenth borrow from the past in planning new public spaces, we century emerged as a generic U.S. style. The style ema- should have a sense of the historical context in which nated from the Hudson Valley and was proffered as a this style was developed and diffused across the country. naturalistic, romantic-environmentalist adaptation In time it was challenged by highly bombastic Victorian and simplification of European, and especially English, styles and the subsequent return of the classical in the gothic rural landscaping and architecture. Downing’s form of Beaux Arts structures and spaces exemplified in vision challenged the strongly Georgian classical and the Progressive Era’s City Beautiful movement. All were rude geometric vernacular versions employed, if any intended in some fashion to promote social order and style were employed at all, in the colonial and postrevo- civilize a postpioneer U.S. landscape desolated by high lutionary periods. Author David Schuyler, here and in mobility and rapid settlement—a hubris too often exhib- other books, has worked successfully to convey Down- ited by planners and designers, I would argue. In Down- ing’s really quite remarkable legacy as an apostle of taste, ing’s case, however, the vision stuck; it worked to democ- humanizing nature and naturalizing spaces as a public, ratize landscape taste nationally and across classes, most The AAG Review of Books 5(1) 2017, pp. 4–6. doi: 10.1080/2325548X.2017.1257266. ©2017 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC. generally in suburban design, and it stays with us, even in antiurban, all in the face of the rapidly changing, increas- subtle forms, far more than its successor styles have done. ingly industrializing antebellum United States. Schuyler’s approach is to assess the impact of Downing’s Despite starting in landscape gardening and horticulture, philosophy and vision, and the immediate and lasting ef- and with his growing fame, he developed a keen inter- fects of his published writings and drawings, especially est in house design as a means to improve U.S. taste in given his short life—he died in 1852 at age thirty-six in general, commissioning superb architectural drafter and a steamboat accident on the Hudson River. Downing’s illustrator Alexander Jackson Davis, not to be confused father owned an ornamental and fruit tree nursery in with Downing himself, as essential collaborator in pro- Newburgh, New York, where the young Downing learned moting the picturesque. Together they produced Cottage practical horticulture, which he combined with scientific Residences (Downing 1842), to promote further their the- study and architectural drawing to shape a career. By his ory of design for a newly prosperous and growing middle early twenties, he was an accomplished horticulturalist class, including how to update and redesign older, classi- inspired to tame and domesticate the unruly landscape cal house forms. Although not a builder’s guide, drawings of the pioneer phase of settlement in the eastern United were sufficient for a good builder to follow, and they intro- States, all of which gave him early access to social re- duced such elements as running water and water closets. spectability with clients wealthy enough to commission The book led to some smart commissions, including for designs and plantings from him. As with many of his public buildings, and like its precursor, it sold well and generation living out of immediate memory of the Amer- was updated and reprinted many times in the succeeding ican Revolution, he became enamored of things English. decades. Fruits and Fruit Trees in America (Downing 1845) He designed his own domestic space of house and garden was a more scientific work leading to lively exchanges with inspired by drawings of English cottages and villas and horticulturalists in other regions of the United States about what soil and climate conditions were appropriate, with a view of the Hudson River—all to model an aes- and adding scientific legitimacy to Downing’s commer- thetic statement and the efficacy of his want to human- cial work. It also further introduced him to Europeans, ize nature and build a sense of place. From this setting many of whom when traveling to the United States made he spent the remaining dozen years of his life drawing, a point of visiting him in Newburgh to share interests and writing, corresponding, and editing works that shaped ideas, all to enhance the promotional value of designs. the next generation of domestic architecture and landscape gardening designs on the land, most immediately In 1846, Downing assumed editorship of the Horticul- for social elites in the eastern United States but simpli- turalist, a kind of utilitarian Life Magazine of antebellum fied in form in middle-class expression across the country rural America, where he found a large and growing au- as well. dience with which to communicate in both literary and scientific terms on a regular schedule. He used the jour- Downing’s most significant writings and drawings were nal quite explicitly to promote his reformist program to compiled in books and journals. His initial fame as the improve the postpioneer landscape, including into the preeminent U.S. authority on landscape gardening and Middle West, through the articles and illustrations he se- rural architecture came from A Treatise on the Theory and lected and through his own editor’s perch. Having read Practice of Landscape Gardening (Downing 1841, and later Tocqueville, and ever conscious that the greatest impact editions), the best-selling and most widely influential on improving the landscape would come from the middle book on landscape gardening and rural architecture pub- class, he especially promoted modest dwellings, such as lished in the nineteenth century. Part of the romantic-en- rural gothic cottages and simple and economical board- vironmental scientific discourse of the time, here focused and-batten farm houses, even as he continued to design on cultural expression in tree breeding and picturesque villas for elites. He incorporated concerns for gendered design for siting houses and gardens, its purpose was hu- uses of domestic environments, for soil conservation, and manistic, educational, and commercial. With an empha- against exotic plant intruders, all in his effort at reform- sis on challenging the dominant Grecian forms of the ing rural life. He promoted scientific farming and agricul- period, Downing sold over the next decade a good many tural education to strengthen the economy and society naturalistic house drawings and garden designs, as well as of the countryside, and his wide readership absorbed the fruit and ornamental trees from the family nursery. More, message. though, this and subsequent work established Downing as the leading proponent of a worldview essentially con- By the end of the 1840s, Downing had moved from adapt- servative and patriotic, stable and permanent, and even ing European architectural styles to promoting a truly WINTER 2017 5 American architecture reflective of an emerging national A full flowering of that vision emerged when Vaux part- identity and character. Articulated most effectively in nered with Frederick Law Olmsted, most notably in New The Architecture of Country Houses (Downing 1850) with York’s Central Park,

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