Painting: The Lawn

The influence of seventeenth-century European classical landscape painting on eighteenth-century English garden design is well known. Painting affected changes in the visual aesthetic of the British garden, which shaped landscapes captured by painters. Painting’s association with/as greensward has been acknowledged in recent publications but is underdeveloped. The lawn was conceived as a ‘masterly painted canvas’ but was also the background in paintings. Braiding a range of literature, this article foregrounds the lawn, and establishes its colonial, patriarchal and capitalist drivers. Visual analysis through an ecocritical lens and a practice-based component using lawn paint will be the approach.