There is an atmosphere an experience and I look to the Claudes for

There is an atmosphere, an experience, and I look to the Claudes for things like that. “You can see a transition from that arcadian vision towards more woodland.” But there are also places where the gardening team work hard to try to preserve the vistas as Henry Hoare would have enjoyed them.Mr Power said: “I look at the Claudes to get the feeling of what Henry Hoare was trying to create because that is where his original ideas came from. “There’s always been a rumour here that Turner painted Stourhead and the field beyond the lake is always known as Turner’s paddock,” Ms Boyd added: “I’d never seen any evidence of it. But when I started to research this exhibition, I went through the Tate archives and came up with four unfinished watercolours of Stourhead.”All were given to the Tate as part of the artist’s personal bequest to the nation in 1856 and were catalogued nearly a century ago. He was much more interested in rustic subjects such as old ruined mills.” Research for the exhibition has uncovered details of many of these artists’ visits.

But while Stourhead is much loved by visitors and among the National Trust’s more popular properties, not all its artistic visitors are impressed.Ms Boyd said: “Turner liked the majesty of it, because it was dramatic I don’t think Constable was so inspired by it. Through subsequent centuries, landscape painting has documented the development of that landscape and artists have been inspired by the garden. It comes full circle.”The range of artists to have captured the gardens at Stourhead is considerable, from lesser-known 18th-century painters such as Bampfylde and Nicholson through to John Piper in the 20th century, who painted it in vibrant abstracts, and Adrian Berg, a Royal Academician today.In the early years, many were commissioned by Henry Hoare to paint the estate, a habit that has proved a boon to garden historians His grandson, Richard Colt Hoare, continued that tradition. The trees Claude used to frame his views are exactly what you get at Stourhead.”Most notably, the temple and bridge in the grounds of Stourhead reflect exactly Lorrain’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos in the National Gallery. There is a copy of the work in the Stourhead collection.Katharine Boyd said: “The whole premise of the exhibition is to show that the landscape painting of 17th-century Europe inspired the landscape at Stourhead.

The idea of Stourhead was that you were enticed and teased around the landscape by its different views.”There is a straight link between the pictures in the picture gallery and what happens on the ground here. Claude Lorrain was painting classic landscapes with temples that emulated the Pantheon and overlooked natural valleys; that is exactly what Henry came back to recreate. Instead, Stourhead contrives a picture but it creates a natural picture. He fell in love with the masterpieces of the 17th-century French artists Claude Lorrain and Poussin while on his Grand Tour of Europe. He brought their works to Wiltshire, some as original paintings, others as copies, many of which remain in the estate collection.While fellow landowners were still following the example of the excessively formal gardens of Versailles in France, Henry Hoare set about establishing a more natural landscape garden, using his European paintings as a model.Alan Power, the head gardener at Stourhead, said yesterday: “It was one of the first landscapes that moved away from the strict formality of European gardens such as Versailles which restricted nature and created form with military precision. There is something engaging about seeing the paintings reproduced in the landscape rather than in a gallery.”The great gardens of Stourhead were created in the 18th century by Henry Hoare, of the wealthy banking family.

In turn, they attracted the finest British artists to be inspired. Now, reproductions of many of the works painted on the 3,000-acre estate by the likes of JMW Turner and Constable over 200 years are being put on show where they were created. The gardens of the magnificent Stourhead estate in Wiltshire were inspired by the works of the great European landscape artists. In the short term, they’re going to have to double their inventiveness to give cigarettes any cool at all.”. And there’s evidence to suggest that a new conservative element is growing among the leading edge.