View/Vista

History

Travelers’ accounts of their journeys through the early American colonies contain many descriptions of extensive views and fine prospects. The frequent repetition of these and the related terms vista, “eminence,” and by the mid-nineteenth century, “panorama,” suggests the importance of views and view-making in the perception, design, and representation of American landscapes.1 The significance of composing a view in the landscape is echoed in the visual record of American gardens. Among the most common images of gardens are those framing the façade of the house and those taking a view from the house out toward the landscape.

As A.-J. Dézallier d’Argenville noted in 1712, one aspect of a “good situation, is, the View and Prospect of a fine Country,” and American property owners often sited their houses with this advice in mind. Planters situated their houses along well-traveled rivers and overlooking harbors, both capturing water views and creating highly visible architectural statements of their status and wealth [Figs. 1 and 2]. As at Monte Video [Fig. 3], houses were often sited on eminences to benefit from the natural topography. Gardens built around such houses took full advantage of their natural settings, and treatise writers such as A. J. Downing (1850) admonished gardeners to “study the character of the place” so as not to “shut out and obstruct the beauty of prospect which nature has placed before your eyes.” The frequent use of the words “command” and “commanding” by visitors recording their impressions indicates the assertion of ownership and control that was so clearly an aspect of the visual presentation of these estates. Water, topographic relief, a variety of rock formations, and vegetal and geological diversity were all prized components of views. Distance was also a measure of merit, not only contributing to the beauty of the scene, but also claiming the breadth of “command” over the countryside.

The term “vista,” while less commonly used than the related terms “prospect” and “view,” was similar in its designation of views created within the garden or looking out of the garden into the surrounding landscape. The term “vista” also carried the more particular connotation, as Thomas Sheridan noted in 1789 and Noah Webster in 1850, of the sight lines that created a view, whether made by an avenue, a meadow, or a space between trees. A vista within the garden was generally terminated by a focal point, such as the Chinese temple at Judge William Peters’s Belmont Mansion, near Philadelphia. Even more common are descriptions of vistas from the garden to the world beyond. John Parke Custis (1717), Hannah Callender (1762), George Washington (1785), and Thomas Jefferson (1804) all used the term to describe framed views created by land cleared of trees (see Prospect).

Views were carefully planned and manipulated by a variety of techniques. The architecture of the dwelling often included exterior viewing platforms such as porches, piazzas, porticos, and verandas [Fig. 4]. Views of the house often were choreographed by carefully designed approaches, which allowed a visitor to catch glimpses of the house as he or she arrived and departed. As an 1837 article in the Horticultural Register noted, the view should be “so divided into different scenes or compartments” by various types of vegetation. Garden buildings or seats, such as those seen at Montgomery Place [Fig. 5], and those placed under a cluster of trees in Charles Fraser’s painting of Rice Hope [Fig. 6], punctuated the landscape with invitations to pause and to admire the vista. Distant views were framed by plantings or by pruned trees, as at the Woodlands and at Springland [Fig. 7]. Their composition was also influenced by elevated mounts, such as those flanking the front gates of Mount Vernon; or by openings in hedges, trees, and walls [Fig. 8].

Another element of view-making was the use of barriers (such as walls, fences, and hedges) to screen less picturesque elements of a plantation. This technique was reported in 1790 in a description of the Elias Hasket