Summary

Author: Bartell, Edmund, jun.

Title: Hints for picturesque improvements in ornamented cottages, and their scenery : including some observations on the labourer and his cottage. In three essays.

Publication: London, J. Taylor 1804.

Price: £480

Reference: 09933

Full Description

First edition. This takes the form of three separate essays, respectively devoted to "the cottage appropriate to the residence of a gentleman", to its grounds and outbuildings, and to "the dwellings of the labouring poor", with rather charming tinted aquatint plates providing external perspective views of six suggested designs. Bartell favoured cottages for the gentry which retained as far as possible the architectural simplicity of the peasant dwellings from which they were copied, and his book combines an enthusiasm for the picturesque with an unusually good practical grasp of such matters as building materials, interior decoration and the housing needs of farm labourers. References in the text, and the existence of another book by Bartell devoted to the town of Cromer, on Norfolk's north coast, make it clear that Bartell was himself a medical practitioner in rural Norfolk, and his book should be seen as a by-product of the vigorous intellectual climate of his county at that time, evidenced by the writings of Repton, by the works of the "Norwich School" of painters, and by the activities of such educated landowners as the statesman William Windham (whose "sweetly fitted up Gothic library" at Felbrigg Hall is mentioned with approval by Bartell on p.47). Although this was the only edition of Bartell's book to be published in England, it was to appear in a German translation published in Weimar in the following year, and it was thus to be of more consequence in contemporary literature on picturesque cottage architecture than its author can originally have anticipated. BAL Cat 199 ; Berlin Kat 2313.