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2024-10-18 12:00:09

Frederick Law Olmsted came to the profession of landscape architecture late in his career. For thirty years after 1837 he served as an administrator-first of New York's Central Park, then of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, and finally of the Mariposa Mining Company in California. Although he was co-designer of Central Park in 1858, it was not until 1865 when he was forty-three, that he made the final decision to devote himself to landscape architecture.

Despite his late commitment to landscape design, Olmsted's ideas on the subject had taken form long before he thought of himself as a landscape designer or attempted anything of the sort in a professional way. His ideas had their basis in the experiences and influences of his youth.

The strongest influence came from his father, who greatly enjoyed natural scenery and devoted most of his leisure time to seeking it out. As soon as young Frederick was old enough, his father set him on a pillow in front of his saddle and took his son through the countryside around their home in Hartford, Connecticut. These short rides expanded to become annual "tours in search of the picturesque" that took Olmsted, by the age of sixteen, through the Connecticut Valley and White Mountains, up the Hudson River, and westward to the Adirondacks, Lake George, and Niagara Falls. As he acknowledged late in his career, "The root of all my good work is an early respect for, regard and enjoyment of scenery… and extraordinary opportunities for cultivating susceptibility to the power of scenery."1

The American landscape itself was the source of Olmsted's earliest lessons in aesthetics but that influence was soon supplemented by the writings of late eighteenth-century-century English landscape gardeners, travelers, and theorists of landscape art. In his youth he read and was influenced thereafter by An Essay on the Picturesque, by Uvedale Price, published in 1794, and Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views (Related Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty), Illustrated in the Scenes of the New Forest, by William Gilpin, published in 1790. Late in his career, Olmsted described these as "Books of the last century, but which I esteem so much more than any published since, as stimulating the exercise of judgment in matters of my art, that I put them into the hands of my pupils as soon as they come into our office, saying, 'You are to read these seriously, as a student of Law would read Blackstone.'"2 The professional gardener who most influenced Olmsted was Humphry Repton, whose Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening and The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening were published in 1795 and 1803, respectively.