William Sawrey Gilpin - Landscape Gardener

Landscape Gardener

In order to support his family, Gilpin turned to a career as a landscape gardener, for which he had little qualification or experience beyond an artist's eye. He was helped and encouraged in this by Uvedale Price, whose theories on picturesque landscaping clearly accorded well with his own ideas. Gilpin's work also shows the influence of the later work of Price's old adversary Humphry Repton, who had died in 1818.

Gilpin seems to have been remarkably successful. In his short landscape design career he reputedly worked at "some hundreds" of sites. Relatively few designs survive on paper or unaltered on the ground. Features employed by Gilpin included amoeba-shaped flower beds, gently curving paths through irregular shrubberies, and raised terrace walks.

Sites where he is known to have worked include:

• Scotney Castle in Kent
• Nuneham House in Oxfordshire, where he laid out the Pinetum which now forms the core of the Harcourt Arboretum attached to the Oxford Botanic Garden.