ABSTRACT
At Strawberry Hill the faculty of the imagination was given primacy over that of intellect. The house and its landscape are a fusion of history and fiction, an architectural palimpsest fabricated from the semantics of Gothic, where the accumulation of parts stood for the whole. Gothic was chosen as the architectural style that would furnish Walpole with most ideas and give him imaginative freedom. The landscape setting too was a blank canvas upon which Walpole could inscribe an enchanted, historicist, commemorative garden. Addison provided the intellectual and theoretical background and Walpole’s designs refashioned and developed his concepts of pleasures of the imagination into original and stimulating associational ideas ‘to please his own taste’. The castle, complementary landscape and collection are linked as unified forms of display. Walpole constructed a visual narrative that led the observer through periods in history to stimulate, through imaginative association, a dynamic dialogue with the past.
