ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM Ij6o TO THE PRESENT DAY
Brown (Capability Brown, 1715-83). His are the wide softly
sweeping lawns, the artfully scattered clumps of trees and the ser-
pentine lakes which revolutionised garden art all over Europe and
America (pi. xcm). This is no longer Rococo, it has the gentle
simplicity of Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and the chaste elegance
of Robert Adam's architecture.
But Adam's is a more complex case than Brown's. Robert Adam
(1728-92) is internationally known as the father of the Classical
Revival in Britain. His revival of Roman stucco decoration and his
delicate adaptation of classical motifs have influenced the Continent
just as widely as the new English style in gardening. Yet delicacy is
hardly what our present knowledge of Greece and Rome would
lead us to expect from a true classical revivalist. Where in Adam's
work is the severe nobility of Athens or the sturdy virility of Rome 5
There is in fact more severity in Lord Burlington's Palladianism
and more virility in Vanbrugh than can anywhere be found in
Adam. Compare, e.g., the walls and ceiling of Adam's Library at
Kenwood (pi. xcvi) with those of any Palladian mansion. Adam
covers his walls with dainty and exquisitely executed stucco work,
in a light and quick rhythm. And he loves to run out a room into a
gently rounded niche screened off by two free-standing columns
with an entablature above. This veiling of spatial relations, this
transparency—air floating from room to apse between the columns
and above die entablature—is decidedly anti-Palladian, original and
spirited. It occurs again in exterior architecture in the entrance
screen to the grounds of Syon House (pi. xcvn). Here too Lord
Burlington would have spoken of flippancy and frippery. And
Vanbrugh's centre pavilions in the wings of Blenheim Palace (pi.
xcn) look, compared with Adam's screen, like boulders piled up
by a giant. Adam's gracefully ornamented pilasters and the lion in
profile silhouetted against the sky make Vanbrugh appear a tartar,
Burlington a pedant. What Adam admired in a building is, in his own
words: "the rise and fall, the advance and recess, and other diversity
of forms", and "a variety of light mouldings".
Now this is eminently revealing. It is neither Baroque nor
Palladian—although in the exteriors of his country houses Adam
did not often depart from Palladian standards—nor is it classical. It
is Rococo if anything—yet another passing and concealed appear-
ance in England of the general European style of the mid-i8th
century. All the same, it is not wrong either to see in Robert Adam
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