The Evolution of the Anglo-American Rural Cemetery: Landscape Architecture as Social and Cultural History

• Autores: David Schuyler
• Localización: Studies in the history of gardens and designed landscape, ISSN 1460-1176, Vol. 4, Nº 3, 1984, págs. 291-304
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • A typical Englishman or American making the Grand Tour in the closing decades of the eighteenth century paid the obligatory visit to Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville, and in the early years of the following century such "tourists" made pilgrimages to the new Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise. In Cemetery Improvement (1840), for example, George Collison pointed out that "Every continental traveller pays an early visit to the cemetery of Père Lachaise", while Americans almost invariably described that burial ground as "the most attractive spot in France". At first these published travel accounts took on a formulaic quality, with each book repeating almost verbatim what other visitors recorded of the beauty of the scenery, but predictability detracts only slightly from the historical value of such descriptions: at Ermenonville and Père Lachaise English and American travellers confronted scenes foreign to their experience at home. Rousseau, the great champion of nature, was buried on an island in a garden, an associationallandscape full of rustic structures and classical temples; the design of Père Lachaise employed the lessons of eighteerithcentury English landscape theory and turned the garden into a setting appropriate for funereal art. To their surprise tourists discovered that "Parisians are accustomed to visit these silent abodes of the dead on Sunday, as a promenade". By the 1820s and 1830s, promoters of rural cemeteries on both sides of the Atlantic praised Père Lachaise as the model for modem burial grounds. "Who, that has ever visited the romantic Cemetery of Père Lachaise", asked the author of Necropolis Glasguensis, "would not wish that there were, in this our native land, some more attractive spot dedicated to the reception of the dead, than those vast fields of rude stones and ruder hillocks, to which we are ever and anon called, when attending the obsequies of a kinsman or companion".