Mr Hamilton's Elysium
The Gardens of Painshill

The Hon. Charles Hamilton was one of those extraordinary eighteenth-century gentlemen who, like Lord Cobham at Stowe and Henry Hoare at Stourhead, turned their gardens into works of art.



Inspired by his time in Italy, Hamilton set out to transform the 'accursed hill' at Painshill in Surrey into a pictorial landscape complete with serpentine lake and water wheel, Turkish Tent, 'Chinese Bridge', Ruined Abbey, Grotto and Hermitage. The garden soon ranked with the best in the land but it later lay forgotten until rediscovered in the 1970s. The restoration over the last thirty years or so has been as careful and dramatic as any. Now Painshill Park is visited by thousands and even the famous vineyard is flourishing again.



This book is fully illustrated with archive images and wonderful photographs of the park and its amazing buildings.

Contents





Chapter 1: The gardens of Painshill



Chapter 2: A brief history of the estate



Chapter 3: The Hon. Charles Hamilton



Chapter 4: Hamilton the collector



Chapter 5: The lake



Chapter 6: The buildings



Chapter 7: The exotic and oriental



Chapter 8: Hamilton's trees and shrubs



Chapter 9: Images of Painshill



Chapter 10: Hamilton and the Picturesque



Chapter 11: The vineyard



Chapter 12: Aftermath and restoration



References

Picture credits

Acknowledgements

Index

A key principle in the design of Painshill is illusion. This particularly affects spatial awareness - the lake, because it changes shape and cannot be seen all at once, has often deceived visitors as to its actual size, as has the pine forest at the western end of the gardens. The open lawns were made to seem doubly large by cleverly placed plantings, again because they could not be seen in one view. Buildings, too, could be deceptive, such as the Hermitage, which had a totally different back from its front and would be taken for another building when approached late in the circuit from the rear. Many of the buildings created illusion in being made of a different material from that which they appeared to be made from - the portico of the Temple of Bacchus and the Gothic Temple were of wood to resemble stone, and the Mausoleum, Gothic Tower and Ruined Abbey were of brick rendered to look like stone. The wooden five-arch bridge was often mistaken for stone. The grotto, again basically brick, was given a dressing of 'tufa' to look like a natural cave.



Illusion could extend to an entire area. The whole of Grotto Island was covered with 'tufa' constructions of various shapes and sizes as if to suggest an extensive outcrop of marine rock. Large boulders were strewn around the cascade to give the impression of mountainous terrain. The pine wood would suggest a forest.



There is something theatrical, too, in Hamilton's design. His control of illusion nods to the perspectives of a theatre as well as of a painting, and the buildings have sometimes been compared to a theatre or even a film set. The Kentian tableau, because it is of three dimensions, owes as much to the theatre as it does to art. And the amphitheatre, though so called because of the tiered nature of the plantings, suggests by name a link with the world of the theatre. In the eighteenth century the word 'theatre' could denote a place where things happened (compare the more modern 'theatre of war') as well as the more specific meaning of a place of performance; and a good many things happened at Painshill. The metaphor of the theatre occurred to Hamilton when describing in a letter the political turmoil of 'this theatrical winter'.



Painshill may be seen as a garden with a political flavour in a broad sense of the word, inasmuch as the natural landscape look was being cultivated by the Whig Opposition, whose watchword was Liberty, expressed in gardening terms as freedom from geometrical constraints and from the authoritarian tyranny of design exemplified in Louis XIV's Versailles. As we shall see, Hamilton's work and social milieu brought him into the Opposition camp even though he himself was not politically active.



There was also a moral dimension to the gardens. Stephen Duck, in the poem quoted earlier, gives implicit approval to the vineyard as a source of giving pleasure, and Hamilton's transformation of the land from infertile to productive was very much in tune with the moral tenor of the times, although self-interest was permissible at the same time: 'were this sort of Husbandry practised in many other Parts of England, it would be of great Service to the Public, and amply increase the Value of the Lands to the Proprietor'.



Painshill was not created in a vacuum, and Hamilton was well aware of contemporary developments in garden layout, some of which must have rubbed off on him. Writers such as Alexander Pope had been calling for a more natural approach much earlier in the century, though the relaxation of straight lines took time to happen in practice. It was not until the 1730s that the more naturalistic look started to come in, and for some years geometry lingered on, often in conjunction with its opposite, especially in those gardens such as Stowe which had originally been constructed along bold formal lines. Even in William Kent's designs there are still straight lines. But the revolution had been started, and Hamilton can be seen as continuing and developing Kent's work in an ever richer and deeper way.



The date of 1738, when Hamilton commenced the creation of Painshill, was early in the history of the landscape garden, making him a pioneer. But a few gardens had been started, or begun to be re-shaped, by then, and several more grew up in the 1740s and 1750s when Hamilton was actively engaged in garden-making. Some of those estates were close enough to have given Hamilton ideas, especially Claremont, Esher Place and Woburn Farm, all within a few miles of Painshill. Kent worked at the first two and advised Philip Southcote at Woburn.



At Claremont, more famed at the time than it is perhaps today, Kent had transformed Bridgeman's formal layout into something more natural and certainly more pictorial. It had a lake, an island with a building, a bridge and a belvedere by Vanbrugh that is a strong candidate for the inspiration behind Hamilton's Gothic Tower. The grotto by Stephen Wright (1750) could be a harbinger for the Painshill grotto, for it was cave-like in appearance and sited by the edge of the lake. Esher Place had a number of buildings in settings that showed them off, while Woburn Farm was the epitome of the ferme ornée, an estate where the decorations of a garden were brought into the agricultural parts. Shrubs and flowers were planted in profusion well away from the house, as at Painshill, and the walk to the belvedere, perched on top of a slope looking down on the River Bourne, resembled the straight walk from the amphitheatre to the Gothic Temple at Painshill, with its view down to the lake. The ruined chapel could well have been a contributory inspiration for Hamilton's abbey.