Pleasure Gardens talk in London

The author Sarah Jane Downing kindly gave me an interview recently on her new book about Georgian Pleasure Gardens. If you're in London you can catch her giving a lecture in November to The Georgian Group - details below and on The Georgian Group website.

17th November 2009
Lecture / The English Pleasure Garden 1660-1860 by Sarah-Jane Downing*
6 Fitzroy Square W1
6.30pm, £10

The English Pleasure Gardens were the public galleries of their time - an embodiment of the romanticism of the Grand Tour. The Temple of Comus at Vauxhall was a Rococo marvel and the Rotunda at Ranelagh was a triumph based on the Pantheon in Rome. They inspired the finest artists, musicians and writers: Hogarth, Canaletto, Handel, Mozart, Walpole, Smollett, Burney and Austen all wrote about, painted or are otherwise associated with the gardens, many of which disappeared almost without trace during the nineteenth century. Sarah-Jane Downing brings back to life a forgotten art-form that was quintessentially English, of real social and artistic importance in its time.

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