Downing etched indelible mark on nation's landscape

By David Schuyler
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

From the summit of Mount Beacon, a Revolutionary war site that he considered one of Nature’s “most majestic thrones,” Downing looked upon “one of the most lovely, picturesque and magnificent prospects in the world” — the mid-Hudson Valley.

Downing, a nurseryman, landscape gardener and prolific writer, is generally considered the first influential figure in the history of landscape architecture in the United States and the father of the American park movement.

Born in Newburgh, on Oct. 31, 1815, his youth was defined by the cultural geography of the mid-Hudson Valley, and during his explorations of the countryside he studied landscape, flora, architecture and history. These lessons became a foundation for his later work in landscape and architectural design.

Downing was the author of four influential books, ‘‘A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America’’ (1841), ‘‘Cottage Residences’’ (1842), ‘‘The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America’’ (1845), and ‘‘The Architecture of Country Houses’’ (1850). He also edited a monthly magazine, ‘‘The Horticulturist,’’ a journal devoted to ‘‘rural art and rural taste,’’ from July 1846 until his death six years later.

Downing preached a gospel of taste appropriate to the rising American middle class. His writings and designs constitute an evocation of the reformist powers of the domesticated landscape, a symbolic middle ground nestled between the frantic pace, squalid conditions and sordid temptations of the city, on one hand, and frontier conditions that were closer to barbarism than civilization, on the other.

In his first book on landscape gardening, Downing promoted two visions: the Beautiful and the Picturesque. He described the Beautiful as “nature or art obeying the laws of perfect existence (i.e. beauty), easily, freely, harmoniously, and without the display of power.”

The characteristics of the Beautiful included smoothness, regularity, and gradual variation, which Downing expressed in this vignette: the house is classical house, the trees round-headed, the lawn smooth and closely cropped, the drive follows a sweeping curve. Here was a serene, harmonious landscape.

If the Beautiful was essentially a controlled landscape, the Picturesque was a less ordered space dominated by roughness, irregularity, and sudden variation. Downing chose this vignette for the Picturesque: The dwelling is a rural Gothic cottage, the trees spire-topped (conforming to the mountains in the distance), the lawn irregular in surface, and the rocky foreground overgrown with plants.

In his writings, Downing projected a vision of a conservative social order, characterized by permanence, by love of place, and by a corresponding degree of civility among people. The properly designed home and garden, he believed, would help stabilize the nation’s institutions, discipline a mobile population, refine and civilize all Americans.

The ideal of civilization, Downing preached to his readers, was one deeply rooted in the valley.

“There is no part of the Union where the taste in Landscape Gardening is so far advanced,” he wrote in the Treatise, “as on the middle portion of the Hudson.”

Among the places he illustrated were Hyde Park, formerly the estate of David Hosack, which Downing praised as “one of the finest examples of the modern style of Landscape Gardening in America.” Other mid-Hudson properties included Blithewood, Robert Donaldson’s estate at Annandale-on-Hudson, and Edward Livingston’s Montgomery Place, a Federal-era house in Rhinebeck.

In his brief professional career, Downing provided designs that transformed the landscape of the mid-Hudson. The Gothic Revival turrets of his Newburgh residence, heralded a new architectural vocabulary, and in the last two years of his life, he began practicing architecture with Calvert Vaux, who would be inspired by Downing to later create Manhattan’s Central Park with Frederick Law Olmsted.

Vassar recruits Downing

Among the many commissions of Downing and Vaux in the valley were numerous dwellings in the vicinity of Newburgh and Matthew Vassar’s Poughkeepsie estate, Springside, for which they designed the mansion house (never constructed), a cottage, barn and other buildings.

Downing also promoted the agricultural economy of New York state. He championed the emergence of the Hudson Valley as a fruit-growing region, and was one of the most articulate advocates of a state-supported agricultural college and experimental farm. Downing expected that the curriculum of the school teach both practical farming and its scientific underpinnings. Convinced that wisdom was “knowledge put into action,” he hoped that graduates of the school would improve agricultural practices and reinvigorate the overall quality of rural life.

Downing also espoused public parks as essential open spaces within the nation’s cities and advocated the suburb as a middle ground between city and country. Recognizing that railroads and other transportation technologies made possible the separation of workplace and home, he articulated a vision of suburban communities that combined a spacious setting for single-family homes and proximity to urban jobs and cultural institutions.

At the time of his death, in the tragic burning of the Hudson River steamboat Henry Clay near Yonkers on July 28, 1852, Downing was overseeing construction of his plan for the landscape of the grounds of the President’s House and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., which he hoped would demonstrate the value and benefit of public recreational grounds in cities.

The designs for houses and gardens he presented, though, had a distinct regional cast and deep roots in the Hudson Valley. Thus, what Downing prescribed as the middle-class ideal of the proper domestic landscape, which proved to have such a powerful influence on his countrymen, spread a Hudson Valley aesthetic across the nation.

When the agriculturist and educator Henry F. French asserted that Downing’s greatest monument would be found in “cultivated groves and gardens,” in the improved architecture evident “in every valley, in every town and every village,” he was describing the transformation of the Northeast into the Greater Hudson Valley.

David Schuyler, who is from Newburgh, is a professor of American studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. He is the author of ‘‘Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852’’ (Johns Hopkins University Press).