Plan du Jardin et Vuë des Maisons de Chiswick, 1736

John Rocque (ca. 1704 - 1762)

RA Collection: Art

This elegantly engraved plan by the Huguenot surveyor and map-maker John Rocque shows Lord Burlington's celebrated gardens at his country villa in Chiswick shortly after they were first laid out in the mid 1730s. Designed by Burlington himself in collaboration with the painter/architect William Kent - his favourite advisor in all aspects of the visual arts - they are as conscious an imitation in miniature of an Italian villa garden as Burlington's additions to his Jacobean house were of Palladio's Villa Rotonda. Rocque's engraving is one of a series of similar plans of major aristocratic gardens of this period, mostly within easy reach of London. First published between 1736 and 1738, Rocque's garden 'picture-maps' are unique in the way that their compartmentalised arrangement captures Kent's notion of a new manner of laying out gardens no longer centred on the house to which they belonged but rather as a series of pictures in 'natural' landscape, forming a sequence of discrete visual compositions through which visitors passed as they might in a picture gallery, except that in doing so they themselves become denizens appropriate to a particular scene.