Painshill | |
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![]() The Abbey: one of the surviving original follies | |
Location | Cobham, Surrey, England |
Coordinates | 51°19′43.90″N0°25′46.48″W / 51.3288611°N 0.4295778°W |
Area | 64 hectares (158 acres) |
Created | 1738 - 1773 |
Founder | Charles Hamilton (MP) |
Owned by | Elmbridge Borough Council |
Open | Every day (except Christmas and Boxing Day) |
Collections | John Bartram Heritage Collection |
Designation | Grade I |
Connecting transport | South Western Railway |
Website | http://www.painshill.co.uk |
Painshill (also referred to as "Pains Hill" in some 19th-century texts [1] ), near Cobham, Surrey, England, is one of the finest remaining examples of an 18th-century English landscape park. It was designed and created between 1738 and 1773 by Charles Hamilton. The original house built in the park by Hamilton has since been demolished.
Painshill is owned by Elmbridge Borough Council and managed by the Painshill Trust. Painshill, which is open to the public (with entry charge), has been Grade I listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. [2] In 1998 Painshill was awarded the Europa Nostra Medal for the "Exemplary restoration from a state of extreme neglect, of a most important 18th-century landscape park and its extraordinary buildings." [3] [4] In May 2006, Painshill was awarded full collection status for its John Bartram Heritage Collection, by the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens (NCCPG). [5]
Charles Hamilton was born in 1704 in Dublin, the 9th son and 14th child of James Hamilton, 6th Earl of Abercorn. He was educated at Westminster School and Oxford, and went on two Grand Tours, one in 1725 and a further one in 1732.
In 1738 Hamilton began to acquire land at Painshill and, over the years, built up a holding of more than 200 acres (81 ha). His creation was among the earliest to reflect the changing fashion in garden design prompted by the Landscape Movement, which started in England in about 1730. Hamilton used what today are called organic gardening and organic lawn management techniques. [6] It represented the move away from geometric formality in garden design to a new naturalistic formula. Many of the trees and shrubs planted by Hamilton were sent to him from Philadelphia by the naturalist John Bartram. The garden was open to respectable visitors, who were shown round by the head gardener for a tip, and was visited by many well-known figures including two visits by William Gilpin, pioneer of the Picturesque, Thomas Jefferson with John Adams, and Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau separately, on special tours of gardens, [7] and the important landscape garden author Thomas Whately. Then as now, there was a particular route round the park recommended, designed to bring the visitor upon the successive views with best effect. Views from Painshill were painted on some pieces of the Frog Service commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia from Wedgwood. [8]
Hamilton eventually ran out of money and sold the estate in 1773 to Benjamin Bond Hopkins, [9] who held the estate until his death in 1794. [10] In 1778 Hopkins commissioned architect Richard Jupp to rebuild Painshill House in a different place within the park. The house was later extended in the 19th century by architect Decimus Burton and is now a grade II* listed building. [11]
Henry Luttrell, 2nd Earl of Carhampton (7 August 1743 – 25 April 1821) bought Painshill in 1807 from William Moffat. Luttrell lived at Painshill having fled from the ancestral Luttrellstown Castle near Clonsilla outside Dublin, where his role in crushing the Irish Rebellion in 1798 made it unsafe to stay. (His ancestor Colonel Henry Luttrell had been assassinated in Dublin in 1717 for betraying the Irish to King William III of England.) After his death in 1821, Luttrell's wife Jane lived at Painshill until her death in 1831 when it was sold it to Sir William Cooper, High sheriff of Surrey.
Sir William Cooper and his wife, later his widow, lived there until 1863, and installed Joseph Bramah's suspension bridge and water wheel, and planted an arboretum designed by John Claudius Loudon. In 1873, the English poet, literary and social critic, Matthew Arnold, rented Pains Hill Cottage from Mr. Charles J. Leaf and lived there until his death in 1888. [12] In 1904 Charles Combe of Cobham Park purchased and lived in Painshill Park, his son having moved into Cobham Park.
Until World War II Painshill Park was held by a succession of private owners. In 1948 the estate was split up and sold in separate lots for commercial uses. The Park's features fell into decay.
By 1980 the local authority, Elmbridge Borough Council, had bought 158 acres (64 ha) of Hamilton's original estate and the work of restoring the landscape garden and its many features could start. In the following year, the Painshill Park Trust was founded as a registered charity with the remit "to restore Painshill as nearly as possible to Charles Hamilton's Original Concept of a Landscaped Garden for the benefit of the public." [13] There is a wealth of 18th-century images of the main features of Painshill to help the process.
The restoration of this Grade I continued, in 2013 work was completed on the restoration of the Crystal Grotto, further restoration work in the park is dependent on the availability of funding. The park now borders the A3 road, which allows easy access.
Today Painshill comprises 158 acres (64 ha) of the original more than 200 acres (81 ha) owned by Charles Hamilton in the 18th century. The landscape garden stretches along the banks of the winding River Mole on land that has a number of natural hills and valleys.
The central feature is a serpentine lake of 14 acres (5.7 ha) [14] with several islands and spanned by bridges and a causeway. The water for the lake and the plantings is pumped from the River Mole by a 19th-century beam engine powered by a water wheel. Hamilton enhanced the views of hills and lake by careful plantings of woods, avenues and specimen trees to create vistas and separate environments including an amphitheatre, a water meadow and an alpine valley. As focal points in the vistas and as sympathetic elements to be discovered in the landscape, Hamilton placed a number of follies, small decorative buildings, which include a grotto, a Gothic "temple", "ruins" of a Gothic abbey, a Roman mausoleum, and a Gothic tower with a view of the countryside. [3]
All these still exist and have been restored, and the hermitage (for which a "hermit" was hired on a seven-year contract, but soon dismissed for absenteeism) and Turkish tent have been recreated. The crystal grotto was restored in 2013, and re-opened by Lady Lucinda Lambton. [15] The Roman "Temple of Bacchus" has been reconstructed (2018), though there is now a cast of the Roman statue of Bacchus which it housed, among other antiquities bought on Hamilton's Italian tours. It was sketched in 1770 by the Swedish artist Elias Martin; [16] he went on to illustrate the 1783 book Bacchi Tempel ("The Temple of Bacchus") by Sweden's national bard, Carl Michael Bellman. [17]
Among the original plantings are a number of important specimens including fine examples of Cork Oak, Yew, Beech, Silver Birch and three Cedars of which one, known as the Great Cedar is 120 feet (37 m) high and is thought to be the largest Cedar of Lebanon in Europe. [18] In 2010, a conference at Painshill brought together elements of the restoration of this eighteenth-century Landscape Garden. [19]
The landscape garden has been a location for film and television production, such as for the grounds of "Bridgeford University" in the 2009 ITV2 series Trinity and the exteriors in the movie adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (2009 film). In 2017, Painshill Park was featured in the science fiction television series Black Mirror , episode "Hang the DJ". [20]
In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings.
Cobham is a village in the Borough of Elmbridge in Surrey, England, centred 17 miles (27 km) south-west of London and 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Guildford on the River Mole. It has a commercial/services High Street, a significant number of primary and private schools and the Painshill landscape park.
Bowood is a Grade I listed Georgian country house in Wiltshire, England, that has been owned for more than 250 years by the Fitzmaurice family. The house, with interiors by Robert Adam, stands on extensive grounds which include a garden designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. It is adjacent to the village of Derry Hill, halfway between Calne and Chippenham. The greater part of the house was demolished in 1956.
An arboretum is a botanical collection composed exclusively of trees and shrubs of a variety of species. Originally mostly created as a section in a larger garden or park for specimens of mostly non-local species, many modern arboreta are in botanical gardens as living collections of woody plants and are intended at least in part for scientific study.
Stourhead is a 1,072-hectare (2,650-acre) estate at the source of the River Stour in the southwest of the English county of Wiltshire, extending into Somerset.
The Boboli Gardens is a historical park of the city of Florence that was opened to the public in 1766. Originally designed for the Medici, it represents one of the first and most important examples of the Italian garden, which later served as inspiration for many European courts. Statues of various styles and periods, ancient and Renaissance, dot the garden. It also has large fountains and artificial caves, notably a grotto built by the artist, architect, and sculptor Bernardo Buontalenti between 1536 and 1608.
A grotto is a natural or artificial cave used by humans in both modern times and antiquity, and historically or prehistorically. Naturally occurring grottoes are often small caves near water that are usually flooded or often flooded at high tide. Sometimes, artificial grottoes are used as garden features. The Grotta Azzurra at Capri and the grotto at Tiberius' Villa Jovis in the Bay of Naples are examples of popular natural seashore grottoes.
The Parc des Buttes Chaumont is a public park situated in northeastern Paris, France, in the 19th arrondissement. Occupying 24.7 hectares, it is the fifth-largest park in Paris, after the Bois de Vincennes, Bois de Boulogne, Parc de la Villette and Tuileries Garden.
Prior Park Landscape Garden surrounding the Prior Park estate south of Bath, Somerset, England, was designed in the 18th century by the poet Alexander Pope and the landscape gardener Capability Brown, and is now owned by the National Trust. The garden was influential in defining the style known as the "English landscape garden" in continental Europe. The garden is Grade I listed in the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of special historic interest in England.
The English landscape garden, also called English landscape park or simply the English garden, is a style of "landscape" garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French formal garden which had emerged in the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. Created and pioneered by William Kent and others, the "informal" garden style originated as a revolt against the architectural garden and drew inspiration from landscape paintings by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin, as well as from the classic Chinese gardens of the East, which had recently been described by European travellers and were realized in the Anglo-Chinese garden.
Cobham Park is a former mansion and country estate in Cobham, Surrey, England. The main house was converted to apartments in the early 2000s, but the majority of the surrounding former parkland remains undeveloped. At its height in the 19th century, the estate included the majority of the neighbouring settlement of dowside Downside.
Kate Felus is a designed-landscape historian. She studied at the University of Warwick and the University of Bristol. Her specialist subject area is the social history of 18th-century gardens and their buildings.
Pains Hill may refer to:
A shell grotto is a type of folly, a grotto decorated with sea shells. The shell grotto was a popular feature of many British country houses in the 17th and 18th centuries. It suited the Baroque and Rococo styles and often represented the mimicry of architectural features from the Italian Renaissance. The idea of a grotto was originally a means to enhance a dank undercroft, or provide an antechamber before a piano nobile, but later it became a garden feature independent of the house, sometimes on the edge of a lake, with water flowing through it.
Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were people encouraged to live alone in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to remain permanently on site, where they could be fed, cared for, and consulted for advice, or viewed for entertainment.
Pope's villa was the residence of Alexander Pope at Twickenham, then a village west of London in Middlesex. He moved there in 1719 and created gardens and an underground grotto. When Baroness Howe of Langar (1762–1835) purchased the house, she demolished it in 1808 and built a new house next to the site. The house and grotto were topics of 18th- and 19th-century poetry and art. In about 1845, a neo-Tudor house known as Pope's Villa was built on approximately the same site; it has been used as a school since the early 20th century. Pope's Grotto, which is listed Grade II* by Historic England, survives, and is open to the public on 30 weekends each year.
Bacchi tempel öppnat vid en hjältes död, commonly known as Bacchi Tempel is a song play, a long poem in two thousand alexandrines, written by Carl Michael Bellman and published by Sweden's royal printing press in 1783. The illustrator was Elias Martin. The work had been preceded by a version from 1779 titled "Bacchi Temple opened at the death of Corporal and Order Oboist Father Movitz", but had been reworked and expanded several times.
A woodland garden is a garden or section of a garden that includes large trees and is laid out so as to appear as more or less natural woodland, though it is often actually an artificial creation. Typically it includes plantings of flowering shrubs and other garden plants, especially near the paths through it.
Stowe Gardens, formerly Stowe Landscape Gardens, are extensive, Grade I listed gardens and parkland in Buckinghamshire, England. Largely created in the 18th century, the gardens at Stowe are arguably the most significant example of the English landscape garden. Designed by Charles Bridgeman, William Kent, and Capability Brown, the gardens changed from a baroque park to a natural landscape garden, commissioned by the estate's owners, in particular by Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, his nephew Richard Grenville-Temple, 2nd Earl Temple, and his nephew George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, 1st Marquess of Buckingham.
The Chiswick House Gardens form the grounds of Chiswick House, now in West London, England. Lord Burlington first arranged the gardens in the 1720s to match his ideas of the gardens of classical times and the Palladianism of the house. In the 1730s, William Kent created England's first landscape garden in part of the area. The gardens have influenced garden design across Britain. With changes in ownership, the gardens fell into decay; a restoration effort was made in the 1950s, and another began in 1988, continuing since then.