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Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer (1851-1934) was one of the premier figures in landscape writing and design at the turn of the twentieth century, a moment when the amateur pursuit of gardening and the increasingly professionalized landscape design field were beginning to diverge. This intellectual biography-the first in-depth study of the versatile critic and author-reveals Van Rensselaer's vital role in this moment in the history of landscape architecture. Van Rensselaer was one of the new breed of American art and architecture critics, closely examining the nature of her profession and bringing a disciplined scholarship to the craft. She considered herself a professional, leading the effort among women in the Gilded Age to claim the titles of artist, architect, critic, historian, and journalist. Thanks to the resources of her wealthy mercantile family, she had been given a sophisticated European education almost unheard of for a woman of her time. Her close relationship with Frederick Law Olmsted influenced her ideas on landscape gardening, and her interest in botany and geology shaped the ideas upon which her philosophy and art criticism were based. She also studied the works of Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry David Thoreau, and many other nineteenth-century scientists and nature writers, which influenced her general belief in the relationship between science and the imagination. Her cosmopolitan education and elevated social status gave her, much like her contemporary Edith Wharton, access to the homes and gardens of the upper classes. This allowed her to mingle with authors, artists, and affluent patrons of the arts and enabled her to write with familiarity about architecture and landscape design. Identifying over 330 previously unattributed editorials and unsigned articles authored by Van Rensselaer in the influential journalGarden and Forest-for which she was the sole female editorial voice-Judith Major offers insight into her ideas about the importance of botanical nomenclature, the similarities between landscape gardening and idealist painting, design in nature, and many other significant topics. Major's critical examination of Van Rensselaer's life and writings-which also includes selections from her correspondence-details not only her influential role in the creation of landscape architecture as a discipline but also her contribution to a broader public understanding of the arts in America. This is the first intellectual biography of the important turn-of-the-century landscape designer and critic Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, a pivotal figure at a time when \"gardening\" and \"landscape architecture\" were beginning to diverge from one another. Van Rensselaer's social status granted her access to upper-class homes and gardens, which in turn enabled her to write familiarly and effectively about contemporary landscape design.

In 1888, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer (1851–1934) brought her knowledge of the fine arts to bear on the subject of landscape gardening for Garden and Forest. The result was a concise manifesto for late nineteenth-century America. Van Rensselaer was already a well-known critic of art and architecture, and in her seven-part series for the new weekly journal, she outlined the principles of landscape gardening as a sister fine art. In this era of conscious professionalism, her essays were essential reading for practitioners as well as for a public wanting to judge, for their own delight and appreciation, the art of landscape gardening as a profession. Her audience included aspiring professionals, clients, gardeners, and public and private users of designed landscapes. Van Rensselaer drew on established theories and nascent practices of landscape architecture, but insisted on retaining the name \"landscape gardening.\" The ideas of the renowned practitioner Frederick Law Olmsted were evident—but not wholly intact. One of her goals was to educate those she classified as \"capable amateurs\"—to educate Americans to recognize the creative genius of artists like Olmsted. Van Rensselaer's manifesto addressed issues such as artistic self-expression, the \"idealism\" favored by Van Rensselaer (as opposed to \"realism\"), organized beauty, and composition—with an emphasis on the harmonious arrangement of contrasting forms and contrasting colors, This paper analyzes these topics in the Garden and Forest essays for how they defined the emerging profession for the public. KEYWORDS Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, Garden and Forest , landscape architecture, Gilded Age

The first seventeen years of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s life took place in a city being remade and refined by the great fortunes of the Industrial Revolution. She was born into a family of wealthy New York City merchants on 23 February 1851. Her parents, Lydia Alley and George Griswold Jr., were proud descendents of seventeenth-century New England settlers. The family wealth was generated from the China trade; her grandfather and father sent clipper ships around the world and imported tea, silks, and other items from East Asia. At the age of three, Van Rensselaer moved to a splendid residence

Summers in Marion and Southampton, a trip to see the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, and a cruise down the Rhone River—over a five-year span ofGarden and Forest, from 1888 through 1892, Van Rensselaer contributed essays about these and more experiences and her impressions of a wide diversity of landscapes. Shifting easily from a broad overview of regional setting to details such as the color of a wildflower, she remained a tirelessly curious observer of natural and urban settings. Her editorials, articles, and letters to the editor reveal her knowledge of botany and geology, the manner in which she

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer sits in her study before a cluttered table and gazes directly at the camera. Stacks of paper and a thick reference book lie in front of a typewriter in which a half-finished page is visible. The 1887 photograph, the frontispiece of this volume, was taken in Marion, Massachusetts, then a remote village on Buzzard’s Bay, where Van Rensselaer returned summer after summer to write and to be a part of the congenial and “Bohemian” company that gathered aroundCenturyeditor Richard Watson Gilder and his artist wife, Helena de Kay.¹ The photograph is a softer version

TheAmerican Art Reviewwas sumptuous in relation to the standard late-nineteenth-century magazine, with original etchings and wood-engraved reproductions of drawings created especially for the magazine. During its brief two-year run (1879 to 1881), it was the most important art publication of its day in the United States, and its editor, Sylvester Rosa Koehler, an internationally known scholar of the graphic arts, commissioned reviews and articles from the best available critics. Among his contributors was Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, who was then, according to one art historian, “perhaps the most perceptive and articulate writer on art in America.” When she

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer was alone in combining an expertise in American and European art and architecture with the ability to use the language of science to enhance late-nineteenth-century public awareness and appreciation of the emerging profession of landscape architecture. The more than 330 editorials and unsigned articles inGarden and Forestadded to Van Rensselaer’s known body of work reinforce the contention that the natural sciences figured prominently in her thinking. In particular, Humboldt and Darwin furnished compelling analogies and a new vocabulary for her studies of landscape architecture. Her writings demonstrate an easy familiarity with and love for

In 1894, buoyed up by a doctor’s report that Gris would be able to return to New York with her in May, Van Rensselaer began writing again forGarden and Forestand completed “People in New York” forCentury. In a letter of transmittal to Gilder on 15 January, she was relaxed after a long afternoon drive up into “the red and purple mountains, with the thermometer at 60, the sun like May and the breeze a delicious zephyr.” The description was the most appreciative yet of the Colorado landscape, but the next line revealed her true feelings: “I would