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What can contemporary visual representations of eighteenth-century Kew and Richmond Gardens tell us about what the gardens looked like, the design intentions of the makers, and the experience of the historical visitor? From late 1764 Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown re-designed Richmond Gardens, a site directly adjacent to Kew Gardens. In the eighteenth century these two royal gardens had separate and distinct topographies, but now respectively form the western and eastern parts of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Investigation of a range of visual sources, including maps, topographical prints, and paintings, show not only the physical development of these landscapes, but also how these images were adapted to represent the gardens in specific ways. The changing design and appearance of the gardens reflect the changing debates on garden design, and the rivalries of their makers. Eighteenth-century landscape gardens can now be experienced at a level of maturity that was never possible when they were first landscaped and planted. As trees have grown and matured, these gardens have taken on an appearance that their creators could only have imagined. However, analysis of topographical views shows the extent to which artists represented these new landscapes as completed visual experiences. The views represent the design intentions of their makers, as much as their actual appearance. Kew and Richmond Gardens developed and expanded separately from 1718 onwards, when George II and Queen Caroline, when Prince and Princess of Wales, leased Ormonde Lodge, renaming it Richmond Lodge.1 Thomas Richardson’s 1771 survey, represented in several versions, including a version on vellum from George III’s topographical collection now in the British Library, shows the two separate gardens together on the same plan (Figure 4.1).2 Most traces of them have now been obscured or obliterated entirely by the later development of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Kew Gardens, to the east, had developed since Frederick Prince of Wales leased a house in Kew in 1731, expanding it considerably with the purchase and lease of adjacent land, especially between 1749 and 1750.3 The royal association is essential to understand the gardens, with Frederick’s widow, Princess Augusta,

Seeing an Eden from a Desert: Topographical Views of Kew and Richmond Gardens in the 1760s