building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

architecture. Davis’ landscapes featured mainly scenes created by various
architectural issues following one after the other. For example, in the project to
extend the main mansion on the estate named Montgomery Place, Barrytown, New
York, (1844), Davis lingered over the design of a series of architectural outbuildings,
such as the coach house and a Swiss cottage, built to support a landscape gardening
project, fine tuned after informal advice from Downing.
The project for Locust Grove, the “Italian style” house, designed in 1851 for his
friend Samuel F.B. Morse, 253 followed the model of previous buildings in the
“Italian” Revival style, such as Blandwood Mansion, Greensboro, North Carolina
(1844). The taste for rural houses, which Davis supported both in theory and in
practice, became the planning model for Llewellyn Park, West Orange, New Jersey
(1853‐57) [Figures 119‐120]. Llewellyn Park was without any doubt Davis’
masterpiece of landscape planning. The most striking feature of the project, begun
on the initiative of the rich entrepreneur from New York, Llewellyn Solomon
Haskell, was the picturesque nostalgia for life in close contact with nature. Llewellyn
purchased approximately 40 acres of land and asked Davis to prepare a project for
the property. In 1853, the initial proposal only envisaged the renovation of an
existing farmhouse on the land and the use of 15 acres for a picturesque garden,
leaving the remainder of the property in its natural state [Figure 120]. In 1857,
Llewellyn purchased a further 350 acres, as he foresaw that his private park could
stimulate the development of a model suburb immersed in nature [Figure 55]. Davis
planned the area leaving a common property in the centre of the park on an
irregular shaped piece of ground, and divided the remainder of the land into
exclusive lots of varying size. Finally, he designed a gate house [Figure 119]at the
park entrance. The general ground plan excluded any form of grid or geometric
rigidity and the rural character was guaranteed by his particular refusal to repeat
the orthogonal shapes of the large cities to the scale of the individual lots. It was
such a success that the park was enlarged in the following decade, even though it
253 Samuel F. B. Morse (1791‐1872) was the inventor of the telegraph. Morse was also a painter
interested in landscape gardening. During 1826, he delivered four “Lectures on the Affinity of
Painting with the Other Fine Arts” and he asserted that gardening is a fine art. Cf. the book by
MORSE, F.B. Samuel, Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, edited with intr. by
Nicolai Cikovsky, Columbia, Missouri and London, University of Missouri Press, 1983
152