Denatured

Rosemary Hill

• Karl Friedrich Schinkel: ‘The English Journey’ edited by David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann, translated by F. Gagna Walls
  Yale, 220 pp, £35.00, July 1993, ISBN 0 300 04117 9
• The Modernist Garden in France by Dorothée Imbert
  Yale, 268 pp, £40.00, August 1993, ISBN 0 300 04716 9

By 1815 London was the biggest city anyone had ever seen. It was the most stable and prosperous Western metropolis and had been enriched further by a flood of Continental refugees and by works of art similarly cast loose on a tide of war and revolution. There was now an interest in European painting among the British unequalled since the days of Charles I, and despite the war, English art and architecture, in particular the Gothic and the landscape garden, had many admirers in France and Germany. Napoleon himself ordered Gothic furnishings from London. In the years after Waterloo it was inevitable that cultural tourists should flock to Britain to see at first hand what they had for so long been reading about.