Camera Bella: The Printed Photograph and the Perception of the Italian Garden in America

Rebecca Warren Davidson
Independent Scholar

The gardens of Italy have been a potent source of imagery and ideas throughout the history of Western landscape design. In the United States, the decades from approximately 1890 to 1930 saw the building of hundreds of so-called "Italian" gardens on the estates of a class of newly wealthy individuals who had made fortunes exploiting the riches of the young continent. In the associated professional literature, a lively debate took place regarding the appropriateness of American designers' "imitating" the gardens of another culture instead of creating a "native" garden style. A parallel, but less well known, phenomenon during these years was the use made by both amateur and professional designers of the basic principles of the Italian garden as a paradigm for the smaller domestic garden. Here, too, a related literature addressed to the aspiring middle class contained a consistent set of ideals for the American domestic garden which can be traced directly to the Italian model and, additionally, reveals its migration from elite to bourgeois culture. For both groups, the powerful appeal of the Italian garden in early twentieth-century America arose out of its perceived ability to accommodate the disorderly legacy of historic garden styles in a way that satisfied both the ideals and aesthetics of the era regarding the relationship of art, nature, and society. Specifically, the Italian garden provided a model of how to combine naturalized plantings with an architectural plan, and re-create the gardens of a classical golden age within the modern technological and industrial landscape. The present paper focuses on an aspect of the Italian garden's influence in America that has heretofore received little scholarly attention, namely, the role of photography in Americans' reception and transformation of the Italian model. The first book published in the United States on the subject, Charles Platt's Italian Gardens of 1894, consisted primarily of the author's photographs. A decade later, Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens, arguably the most influential book on the adoption of the Italian garden in America, was also predominantly illustrated with photographs. The vastly increased availability of the photographic image from this time forward was due in part to an important development in the way visual information was communicated in print: the halftone process. Although this method had been used to print photographs as early as the 1850s, it was only in 1881 that a commercially successful method was patented, and not until the 1890s that the use of halftone blocks to reproduce photographs in popular publications became commonplace. Did the widespread availability of photographs of Italian gardens directly contribute to the increased use of Italian motifs and principles in the design of American gardens? Perhaps, but such coincidence does not imply causation. A more useful question is whether the ubiquitous and inexpensive photographic image contributed to a change in Americans' thinking about the Italian garden. It is my contention that it did, changing its perception from that of an elite accoutrement of the wealthy estate to an amenity attainable by the middle class. What is more, the information contained in photographs was different in both kind and meaning from that contained in the paintings and prints which, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, had been the most significant medium documenting the appearance of gardens. To compare an etching or an engraving of a garden scene to a photograph of a similar scene is to be drawn to the fact that the photograph gives the viewer the impression of both immediacy and verisimilitude. In spite of the fact that both the printmaker and the photographer have omitted or included certain features, have established a point of view, and in a myriad of other ways have exercised their artistic license, the photograph is believed to be more reliable. The photograph could, in fact, have been taken by one of us. The event/time/place it records is one we ourselves might have recorded. Thus the "other" of the print is transformed into the "self" of the photograph. The photograph personalizes the experience of the garden in a way that a more elite work of art does not, allowing the viewer to be present in the scene. These contentions will be supported by showing and discussing specific examples of how photography influenced Americans' understanding, reception, and use of the Italian garden, focusing particularly on the work of Platt, Wharton, Edward Lawson, and Martha Brookes Hutcheson. Lawson was the first Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome and created a sketchbook juxtaposing his drawings and photographs. Hutcheson was a practicing landscape architect whose 1923 book, The Spirit of the Garden, provides one of the most direct and clearcut examples of how photographs affected the use of the Italian model for the design of the smaller domestic garden in the United States.