Vauxhall Gardens: A History
- Artist: Various
- Published: 2011
- Publisher: Yale University Press, London
- Edition: -
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 30cm
- Pages: 400
- Illustrations: Includes 80 colour images and 200 black-&-white illustrations
£55.00£45.00
Add to basketVauxhall Gardens: A History
Past Curator of Pallant House Gallery David E Coke will be giving a FREE talk and booksigning at Pallant House Gallery on Thursday 16th June at 6pm to coincide with the books publication date. View more information on this event.
From their early beginnings in the Restoration until the final closure in Queen Victoria's reign, Vauxhall Gardens developed from a rural tavern and place of assignation into a dream-world filled with visual arts and music, and finally into a commercial site of mass entertainment. A social magnet for Londoners and tourists, they also became a dynamic centre for the arts in Britain. By the eighteenth century, when the Gardens were owned and managed by Jonathan Tyers - friend of Handel, Hogarth and Fielding - they were crucial to the cultural and fashionable life of the country, patronized by all levels of society, from royal dukes to penurious servants.
This Vauxhall gardens book is the first produced on the subject for over fifty years, Alan Borg and David E. Coke reveal the spectacular art and the ever-present music of Vauxhall in fascinating detail. In the nineteenth century the Gardens remained a popular attraction, but faced increasing competition from new forms of entertainment such as the circus and the music hall and, with the arrival of the railway, the seaside. Nevertheless, they remained a prominent feature of London life right up to their closure in 1859. Borg and Coke's historical exposition of the entire history of the foremost pleasure garden of eighteenth and nineteenth-century London makes a major contribution to the study of London entertainments, art, music, sculpture, class and ideology, and puts into a very particular context an unusual combination of subjects. It reveals how Vauxhall linked high and popular culture in ways that look forward to the manner in which both art and entertainment have evolved in modern times.
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Authors Biography
David Coke F.S.A., was curator of Gainsborough's House, Sudbury, 1976-79, where he organised the exhibition The Muses' Bower, Vauxhall Gardens 1728-1786. While Director of Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (1981-1997) he curated the Vauxhall Gardens section in the 1984 Rococo exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Publications include: The Muses' Bower, Vauxhall Gardens 1728-1786. Exhibition Catalogue Gainsborough's House ; contributed the Vauxhall Gardens Section in Rococo - Art and Design in Hogarth's England 1728-1786 (V&A, London, 1984); the article on Pleasure Gardens for the Oxford Companion to Gardens (1986); section on 20th Century Art in Chichester Cathedral - An Historical Survey, ed Mary Hobbs (Phillimore, 1994); he edited Hans Feibusch: The Heat of Vision, (Lund Humphries, 1995) and more recently has published 'Roubiliac's Handel for Vauxhall Gardens: A sculpture in context', The Sculpture Journal, 16.2, Autumn 2007. Together with Dr. Alan Borg, his most recent publication is Vauxhall Gardens: A History (Yale University Press, 2011).
