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.
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