Batty Langley was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 garden designer

Garden designer

The term garden designer can refer either to an amateur or a professional who designs the plan and features of gardens. Amateurs design their gardens for their own properties. Professionals, with experienced skills, design gardens that benefit clients...

, and prolific writer who produced a number of engraved designs for "Gothick

Gothic Revival architecture

The Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the 1740s in England...

" structures, summerhouses and garden seats in the years before the mid-18th century.

The eccentric landscape designer, who gave some of his numerous children names like Hiram

Hiram

Hiram , Standard Hebrew ', Tiberian Hebrew ', is a biblical given name.-People:* Hiram I, king of Tyrus, 969–936 BCE* Hiram II, king of Tyrus , 739–730 BCE...

, Euclid

Euclid

Euclid , fl. 300 BC, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I...

, Vitruvius

Vitruvius

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman writer, architect and engineer, active in the 1st century BC. He is best known as the author of the multi-volume work De Architectura ....

 and Archimedes

Archimedes

Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Among his advances in physics are the foundations of hydrostatics, statics and an...

, even attempted to "improve" Gothic

Gothic art

Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, but took over art more completely north of the Alps, never quite effacing more classical...

 forms by giving them classical proportions.

He was the son of a jobbing gardener of Twickenham, and bore the name of David Batty, a patron of his father's. He inherited some of his father's clients in Twickenham, then a village of suburban villa

Villa

A villa was originally an ancient Roman upper-class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became small farming compounds, which were increasingly fortified in Late Antiquity,...

s within easy reach of London by a pleasant water journey on the Thames

River Thames

The River Thames flows through southern England. It is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom. While it is best known because its lower reaches flow through central London, the river flows alongside several other towns and cities, including Oxford,...

. An early client was Thomas Vernon

Thomas Vernon

Thomas Vernon was a landowner and Member of Parliament in eighteenth century England. He was the only son of Bowater Vernon , who inherited Hanbury Hall, Worcestershire and large estates in Hanbury and elsewhere, from his second cousin Thomas Vernon who had died childless...

 of Twickenham Park.

For the Palladian

Palladian architecture

Palladian architecture is a European style of architecture derived from the designs of the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio . The term "Palladian" normally refers to buildings in a style inspired by Palladio's own work; that which is recognised as Palladian architecture today is an evolution of...

 house built at Twickenham by James Johnston

James Johnston

James Johnston may refer to:*James Johnston , Scottish Secretary of State*James William Johnston , Canadian politician and judge*James Finlay Weir Johnston , chemist...

 in 1710 (later "Orleans House", demolished 1926), Langley, probably on his own endeavour, prepared and published a garden plan, which offered an encyclopaedia of the garden features that were swiftly becoming obsolete by the time the plan (illustration, right) was published in Langley's A Sure Method of Improving Estates (1728): here are several maze

Maze

A maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage through which the solver must find a route. In everyday speech, both maze and labyrinth denote a complex and confusing series of pathways, but technically the maze is distinguished from the labyrinth, as the labyrinth has a single...

s, a "wilderness" with many tortuous path-turnings, cabinets de verdure cut into dense woodland, formal stretches of canal and formally-shaped basins of water, some with central fountains, a central allée

Avenue (landscape)

__notoc__In landscaping, an avenue or allée is traditionally a straight route with a line of trees or large shrubs running along each, which is used, as its French source venir indicates, to emphasize the "coming to," or arrival at a landscape or architectural feature...

 of trees leading to an exedra

Exedra

In architecture, an exedra is a semicircular recess or plinth, often crowned by a semi-dome, which is sometimes set into a building's facade. The original Greek sense was applied to a room that opened onto a stoa, ringed with curved high-backed stone benches, a suitable place for a philosophical...

. His New Principles of Gardening, 1728 included designs for mazes, a feature he could never quite leave behind.

Batty Langley is best known for one of his confident self-promotions, Ancient Architecture Restored published in 1742 and reissued in 1747 as Gothic Architecture, improved by Rules and Proportions, a bit of cockscombry that thoroughly irritated Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. He is now largely remembered for Strawberry Hill, the home he built in Twickenham, south-west London where he revived the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors,...

, whose Gothick villa at Twickenham, Strawberry Hill

Strawberry Hill House

Strawberry Hill is the Gothic Revival villa of Horace Walpole which he built in the second half of the 18th century in what is now an affluent area of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames in Twickenham, London...

, gave impetus to the stirrings of the Gothic Revival:

All that his books achieved, has been to teach carpenters to massacre that venerable species, and to give occasion to those who know nothing of the matter, and who mistake his clumsy efforts for real imitations, to censure the productions of our ancestors, whose bold and beautiful fabrics Sir Christopher Wren

Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren FRS is one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history.He used to be accorded responsibility for rebuilding 51 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710...

 viewed and reviewed with astonishment, and never mentioned without esteem. (Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, 1798, p 484)

Langley's books were enormously influential in Britain's American colonies. At Mount Vernon, for example, George Washington relied upon plate 51 of Langley's The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs as the source for the famous Venetian (or Palladian) window in the dining room; upon plate 54 of the same book for the ocular window on Mount Vernon's western facade; and upon plate 75 of Langley's The Builder's Jewel for the rusticated wood siding.

Batty Langley was also thought to be an important Freemason and many of his books were dedicated to his Masonic brethren. The frontispiece to The Builder's Jewel (1741), for example, contains many examples of Masonic symbolism found in the first three degrees of Freemasonry.

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