Resumen de Thomas Robins at Painswick
It was in 1972 that John Harris first drew attention to Thomas Robins's "Gardens of Delight". The Limner of Bath recorded a series of enchanting Elysiums, all on a modest scale and all developing that compromise between the regular and irregular layout which Alexander Pope originated in his garden at Twickenham and Shenstone popularized at the Leasowes. Though it has become fashionable to call these gardens rococo, a tendency reinforced by the flourishes and tendrils of Robins's borders, they could equally well be styled "bijou". Both as gardens and as paintings, this is essentially the art of the miniaturist, crowding many small features into a limited area and calculated to appeal to the dilettante and the connoisseur. Almost without exception, Robins's gouaches are now the sole means of studying this most transient of horticultural art-forms, since the gardens of Old Windsor, Woodside, Honington, and Davenport have all vanished, and with them their complements of whimsical garden buildings. However, one such garden painted by Robins does survive, after a fashion. This is the garden at Painswick House in Gloucestershire, captured in an early bird's-eye view of 1748. Mr Harris has reproduced and commented on the view several times, notably in his lavish Robins edition of 1978, but no attempt has hitherto been made at a detailed examination of what remains at Painswick today. This is the purpose of the present article.
