VIENNA.- The Liechtenstein Museum is presenting an exhibition about the history, design and creation of the great landscape gardens of Central Europe. Displayed in the former Ladies’ Apartments and the Library at the Liechtenstein summer palace, the scope of the exhibition ranges from early examples such as the Prater in Vienna or the park of the imperial palace at Laxenburg, where parts of the extensive imperial hunting reserves were opened to the public, to the gardens situated on the eastern fringes of the Vienna Woods (Kahlenberg, Leopoldsberg, Gallitzinberg and Predigtstuhl, Neuwaldegg, Hinterbrühl), the estates at Schönau/Triesting, Vösendorf, Bruck/Leitha, Eisenstadt and Göllersdorf, and the great landscape gardens created by the Liechtenstein family in northern Lower Austria and southern Moravia.

Developed within the framework of the private art collections partnership (www.privateartcollections.at), the exhibition includes more than 200 paintings, engravings, etchings, watercolours, plans, maps, photographs and sculptures illustrating the history and beauty of these gardens, inviting the visitor to leave behind the hectic bustle of modern life and experience the tranquillity of these verdant and blossoming oases. Paintings by Bellotto, Hackert, Rebell, Waldmüller, Alt or Höger convey a comprehensive picture of this cultural phenomenon which is so closely bound up with the philosophy and history of the period between 1760 and 1850. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the leading French writer and philosopher of the Enlightenment, is represented in the exhibition by a portrait bust sculpted by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828); it was Rousseau’s maxim of “back to Nature” that provided the guiding principle for the entire landscape garden movement.

From the last quarter of the 18th century until well into the first half of the nineteenth century most aristocratic families set about remodelling their formal Baroque gardens in the new English style, sometimes laying out large English landscape parks. Spreading almost like a mania from England to France and then over the whole of continental Europe, this fashion was soon taken up by the imperial Austrian family and quickly took hold of the nobility and the aspiring upper-middle classes. The largest gardens in Central Europe were those owned by the Liechtenstein family situated between their estates at Feldsberg (Valtice) and Eisgrub (Lednice) in southern Moravia, but they also had their estates in the Hinterbrühl and the area to the south of Greifenstein on the Danube transformed into landscape gardens.

Other aristocratic families, in particular the Esterházys at Eisenstadt, the Schönborns at Göllersdorf, the Harrachs at Bruck/Leitha or the Schwarzenbergs and Count Lacy in Vienna, also took up the new ideas from England and France.

The great formal gardens in the Italian and French taste were thus consigned to the past as outmoded. Many of these geometrical Baroque gardens were modernised and remodelled as a series of "natural pictures" composed on painterly principles. A classic example of this kind of transformation is the garden of the Liechtenstein summer palace in the Rossau quarter which was successively remodelled under the princes Franz Josef I (reg. 1772–1781), Alois I (reg. 1781–1805) and Johann I von Liechtenstein (reg. 1805–1836). At the same time extensive tracts of land, which were intended both to edify as well as conform to strictly economic principles, were being landscaped and "tamed". With his designs for his estates at Eisgrub (present-day Lednice) and Feldsberg (present-day Valtice) Prince Alois I von Liechtenstein laid the foundations of a successful project (also in economic terms) which over the course of the years evolved into the largest landscape gardens in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The transformation of the estate into an English landscape garden brought its own economic benefits in the shape of artificial lakes, which were not only a constituent element of the impressive vistas created in conjunction with the plantings of trees and the architectural features but were also used for breeding carp commercially.

The OASES OF TRANQUILLITY exhibition at the LIECHTENSTEIN MUSEUM demonstrates how these parks were not only a kind of experimental station in terms of their planting and cultivation of rare botanical specimens but often also served their owners and designers as a "playground" for their architectural theories on a small scale. The edifices of French revolutionary neo-Classicism or those of the Gothic Revival had equal influence on these architects, who included Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg (1733–1816), Joseph Hardtmuth (1758–1816), Charles de Moreau (1758–1841) and Joseph Kornhäusel (1782–1860), and on their designs for the triumphal arches, obelisks, picturesque ruins, pavilions and temples that were scattered informally about the landscape gardens.

These gardens increasingly became locations where people spent their leisure time, offering many different amenities: with their cafés, pleasure-houses, grottoes, mazes, cascades, lakes and many other features – including, at Wörlitz, a volcano that belched real fire – these landscape gardens provided a recreational programme for day and night alike.

A number of the gardens shown in the exhibition at the LIECHTENSTEIN MUSEUM have undergone considerable alteration over the past two centuries, while others have vanished entirely in their original form. Often however these Arcadian landscapes with their impressive stands of trees and exquisite architectural features have been preserved, providing popular recreational areas for the general public.

Extending over approximately 5 hectares, the gardens of the Liechtenstein summer palace in the Rossau quarter of Vienna provide the visitor to the museum with a particularly successful example of the fusion of a formal Baroque garden with an English landscape park. This lush oasis in the city with its impressive stands of trees – the Liechtenstein park boasts the largest plane trees in Vienna – offers a welcome opportunity for a relaxing stroll before or after the exhibition, far away from the hectic bustle of city life, a true "oasis of tranquillity".