Views of English castles and landscape gardens: Swaythling Grange, Southhampton, Basing Park, Hampshire, and four views of Castle Howard near York/ shooting location of “Barry Lyndon” and “Brideshead Revisted”/View from the South East, the lake, the temple and the mausoleum, 8 sheets, all titled on the reverse, watercolour on paper, each 15,5 x 33 cm, framed, (Hu)

The present collection of watercolours leads through British country estates and their surrounding landscape gardens which all were created in the liberal spirit of Enlightenment. They all show how around 1800 the typical Baroque garden arrangement with its formally conceived abstract pattern was replaced by a gardening concept which brought subjective sensations and a naturalistic composition to the fore. The new style became the fashionable program of fine aristocratic manor houses. Landscape architects learned on their „Grand Tour“ through Italy from the new architectural concept of gardens and blended Palladian elements, point de vues, pastoral buildings and Roman ruins with English naturalism in their future projects. They created spatial works of art with waters, landscape terraces and pittoresque scatterings of trees. Anticipating his famous gardens in Muskau and Branitz, Hermann Duke of Pückler Muskau admired the intellectual and political dimensions of association of grand masters such as of Lancelot "Capability" Brown (1716-1783, Chatsworth House, Trentham Castle, Petworth House) and in 1825 toured to gardens in Great Britain including England, Scottland and Ireland.