Bridge

History

Bridges had many applications beyond the bounds of the garden. The term bridge referred to structures that carried pedestrians, carriage, and rail traffic over obstacles such as water and ravines. In the context of the garden, however, bridges also took on ornamental roles, and their construction was dictated by aesthetics as well as load-bearing requirements.

Bridges were built by the earliest settlers along main transportation routes. It is not until the second half of the eighteenth century, a period of sharp increase in the construction of elaborate landscape gardens , that there is evidence of bridges constructed specifically for garden settings. Treatises such as William and John Halfpenny’s Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste (1755) and J. C. Loudon’s An Encyclopaedia of Gardening ( 1 8 2 6 ) demonstrate a wide variety of designs, styles, and materials used for bridges. Most American examples of garden bridges, however, appear to have followed relatively simple designs built of wood and stone.

Garden bridges were built over waterways both natural, as with the cascade at Blithewood on the Hudson River [Fig. 1], and artificial, as at the Vale in Waltham, Mass. [Fig. 2]. At the garden of the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House in Cambridge, Mass., it was said that a pond was created “as an apology for the bridge.” While water was the most common obstacle crossed, bridges were used also to span roads or depressions, such as fosses or ditches. Around 1804, Thomas Jefferson proposed a bridge to connect the park grounds of his estate, which lay on either side of a public road.

Bridges also were used as focal points and as viewing platforms. At Gray’s Garden in Philadelphia and William Paca’s garden in Annapolis, a bridge was used to signal movement from one part of a garden to another. In Paca’s garden, the bridge has been reconstructed using a combination of archaeological findings and Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Paca [Fig. 3]. Crossing the fish-shaped pond, the bridge marks the transition between the regular geometric form of the parterres and the relative naturalism of the wilderness at the base of the garden.

The artistic convention of using a bridge to demarcate various zones in a landscape painting, a practice that can be traced back to seventeenth-century painters, explains the prominence of bridges in paintings of estate gardens. This compositional technique is particularly apparent in the work of artists who sought to model themselves after the pastoral painting traditions of Poussin, Claude, and the Carracci. A case in point is Charles B. Lawrence’s painting of the Bordentown, N.J., estate Point Breeze [Fig. 4], in which the artist used a bridge to define the middle ground between the Delaware River in the foreground and the distant prospect of the house. In his painting of Canfield House [Fig. 5], in Sharon, Conn., Ralph Earl took painterly poetic license by using a bridge to frame his view of the house, echo the line of the road, and lead the viewer to examine the wider landscape.1 Eighteenth-century treatise writer Thomas Whately, a strong advocate of modeling designed landscapes after paintings, suggested using a ruined bridge in “wild and romantic scenes” as a picturesque object that would lend “antiquity to the passage.” His advice was repeated by later writers such as George William Johnson in A Dictionary of Modern Gardening (1847) who recommended bridges as a means to create the illusion that a pond was a river or lake, visually amplifying the extent of the property.

Although American garden bridges were generally simpler than many of the designs included in garden and architectural treatises, a clear change in style occurred through time. In the eighteenth century, bridges such as those described in Gray’s Garden in 1790 displayed the fashion for the exotic allure of China. William and John Halfpenny (1755) and Bernard M’Mahon (1806) articulated the “romantic and pleasing effect” of Chinese-style garden elements (see Chinese manner). The Halfpennys’ Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste included numerous designs for bridges, including a plan of a single-trussed timber bridge [Fig. 6] that strikingly resembles the bridge in the Paca portrait. In the nineteenth century, rustic bridges, such as those described by A. J. Downing (1847), became popular. Builders often used materials that appeared to be natural. For instance, the irregularly shaped branches with their original bark and the rugged stone used at Mr. V.’s residence in Hallowell, Maine, were described by Timothy Dwight (1796) as resulting from an “accident, rather than the effect of human labour.” Such rustic bridges were in keeping with the irregular and naturalistic qualities associated with the picturesque (see Picturesque and Rustic style), and were particularly recommended for moving water and smaller streams. Johnson’s passage of 1847 argued for the suitability of a bridge’s scale, design, and materials to its setting. A bridge, he wrote, is “not a mere appendage to a river, but a kind of property which denotes its character.”

-- Elizabeth Kryder-Reid