The Foundation for Landscape Studies is pleased to announce its collaboration with the Morgan Library and Museum in mounting the exhibition “Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design,” which opens on May 21 and runs until August 29. Initially conceived and co-curated by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, a landscape historian, collector, and president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies, the exhibition features approximately ninety rare books, manuscripts and drawings.

The exhibition is arranged in a manner that shows how at the beginning of the eighteenth century a new worldview began to emerge in England. It then allows the viewer to see how this ethos—Romanticism—reached its full expression in the late-eighteenth century poetry of William Wordsworth as well as in the writings of Rousseau and Goethe. In addition, watercolor paintings of J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich demonstrate how Romanticism flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century. America’s most significant contribution to Romanticism in landscape design: “Greensward,” the original pen-and-ink plan of Central Park prepared in 1857 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, also will be on display.

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