Castle Howard: An Original Landscape Architecture

Abstract

The early development of Castle Howard in Yorkshire, England, presents a puzzle. From 1699 to about 1738, this landscape replaced a feudal order with a metaphorical organization of spaces of life and death on a vast scale of planting and construction. Christopher Hussey has called Castle Howard an “original” conception of “landscape architecuture.” Castle Howard has also been generally cast historically among the first of the English landscape gardens, and this classification has confounded its relationship to this historiography. The landscape has been thus aligned with a poetic liberality, pastoral “Nature,” painterly pictures in the landscape, and similar tropes of the history of landscape architecture. Other commentators, including Horace Walpole, have called it sublime. These issues form the subject of the exposition here. The site itself reveals some information about such commentary. The early records of the designers, John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and the Earl of Carlisle—especially their drawings, the estate maps and letters—are mined for content. Four early visitors of various stations in life have left accounts that provide some measure of the breadth of its affect in the earliest period its of development. This composite record frames the exposition of the transcendent awe that visitors to Castle Howard have expressed across time, suggesting what might be a fundamental aim of all original landscape architectures.