Wedding Photographer Stowe House — Capability Brown’s Landscape Garden, the Palladian Bridge and Forty Garden Temples
Stowe in Buckinghamshire is England’s largest and most ambitious eighteenth-century landscape garden — a National Trust landscape of 325 acres surrounding the Stowe School mansion, created between 1713 and 1780 by successive owners of the Temple family (Earls Temple and Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos) employing Sir John Vanbrugh, Charles Bridgeman, William Kent and finally Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who lived at Stowe as Head Gardener 1741–51 and created the Grecian Valley in the landscape’s eastern circuit. The result is an unparalleled concentration of garden buildings: forty surviving garden temples, bridges, cascades and eye-catchers distributed through a designed landscape of artificial lakes, serpentine paths, the ha-ha containing the grazing deer and the carefully composed vistas across the Elysian Fields and the Hawkwell Field. For Stowe wedding photography, this landscape provides portrait settings of English eighteenth-century landscape garden architecture of the greatest possible richness and variety.
The Palladian Bridge, the Elysian Fields and the Temple of Ancient Virtue
Stowe’s garden buildings span the full range of eighteenth-century landscape garden architectural modes: the Palladian Bridge (one of only three Palladian bridges in England, c.1738) spanning the Octagonal Lake with its arcaded corridor and carved keystones; the Temple of Ancient Virtue (William Kent, 1734) in the circular rotunda form overlooking the Elysian Fields’ pastoral valley; the Temple of British Worthies (Kent, 1735) with sixteen niches containing busts of English intellectual heroes; and the Gothic Temple’s triangular corner towers and Gothic tracery. Each building provides a specific architectural portrait backdrop of a different eighteenth-century garden architecture mode, from Palladian classicism to mock-Gothic and Chinese.
The Grecian Valley, the Oxford Bridge and the Stowe House Portico
The Grecian Valley — Capability Brown’s major landscape contribution at Stowe (c.1747–51), an artificially hollowed broad valley in the garden’s eastern sector with the Cobham Monument’s column at the head and the Grecian Temple’s Doric portico on the ridge — provides the garden’s most purely landscape (as opposed to building-focused) portrait setting: the broad valley’s mown grass in the evening light, the lone column on the skyline and the total absence of visitors on weekday mornings provide compositions of English landscape garden contemplative emptiness. Stowe House itself — now Stowe School — provides the Corinthian portico’s classical columns visible from the South Parterre’s formal terraces as a house-and-garden portrait backdrop of considerable English country house grandeur.