Bridgeman, Charles

Bridgeman, Charles (d. 1738). Royal Gardener to George II 1728–38, Bridgeman played a major role in the evolution of the English landscape garden. Stylistically his work lay between the geometric layouts of the late 1600s and early 1700s and the freer designs of William Kent and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Bridgeman fused formal elements (parterres, avenues, geometric ponds and lakes) with the transitional (mounts, lawns, irregular cabinets), and the progressive (ha-has, winding walks, irregular lawns and woods, and statuary and garden buildings used to exploit key vantage-points). For the crown he was active at Hampton Court, Kensington, Richmond, St James's Park, and Windsor, whilst his private commissions included Claremont, Eastbury, and Wimpole. Outstanding among his independent clients was Viscount Cobham of Stowe in Buckinghamshire, whose celebrated landscape was recorded in the perspective views of Jacques Rigaud and Bernard Baron published by Sarah Bridgeman, the gardener's widow, in 1739. Bridgeman was a collaborator with Vanbrugh, Gibbs, Kent, and Flitcroft, and friend of the painters Mercier, Thornhill, and Wootton, and of Pope, Prior and other literati. As Horace Walpole noted in his Observations on Modern Gardening, first published in 1780, Bridgeman had ‘many detached thoughts, that strongly indicate the dawn of modern taste’.

Peter Willis