ABSTRACT

In the eighteenth century a veritable craze swept simultaneously over Great Britain, the Continent, Scandinavia and Russia. Infl uenced by the Enlightenment, a new tradition of garden design blurred boundaries between landscape gardens and the surrounding scenery. This new concept of garden aesthetic, often referred to as “the English garden” among many other names such as “the picturesque garden”, “the informal garden” or “the irregular garden” will be examined through a tentative reading of the Pavlovsk Park in Russia. This eighteenth-century landscape park near St Petersburg places into perspective some of the challenges of research into the landscaped garden. Although contemporary writings discuss Anglomania to refer to this seemingly endless stream of scenes and modes of regarding the landscape as a stage that infl uenced the garden layouts, it can be questioned to what extent the source of this new garden aesthetic was solely British. There were prolifi c circles in Germany and France as well as in England. The underlying aesthetic ideas for the garden design of the period drew equally on philosophy, literature, painting and sculpture.