Sculpture and the Garden

Although the integration of sculpture in gardens is part of a long tradition dating back at least to antiquity the sculptures themselves are often overlooked both in the history of art and in the history of the garden. This collection of essays considers the changing relationship between sculpture and gardens over the last three centuries focusing on four British archetypes: the Georgian landscape garden the Victorian urban park the outdoor spaces of twentieth-century modernism and the late-twentieth-century sculpture park. Through a series of case studies exploring the contemporaneous audiences of gardens the book uncovers the social political and gendered messages revealed by sculpture's placement and suggests that the garden can itself be read as a sculptural landscape.