City of New York/Parks & Recreation Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art and Landscape Design: Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s “Greensward” plan for Central Park, from this exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum. Their vision of rolling hills and curving paths came from Europe.

 

One of the greatest landscapes of the Romantic era can be found right in the middle of Manhattan. It isn’t a Turner, a Friedrich, a Delacroix — or anything in a museum, for that matter. It’s the 843-acre “Greensward” plan designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the mid-19th century — or, as we know it, Central Park.

Olmsted and Vaux imported topsoil from New Jersey, but their vision of rolling hills and curving paths came from Europe. There, in paintings and writings and on grand estates, the Enlightenment’s strict geometries were slackening. Versailles, with its manicured, monarchical hedgerows, was no longer the model. Artists and aristocrats sought out rustic, informal scenery, reflecting a new immediacy in politics and religion.

You can pore over plans for Central Park and its precedents at the Morgan Library & Museum, in the exhibition “Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art and Landscape Design.” This captivating, if geographically unbalanced, show traces the Romantic movement from its first flowerings on English estates to American Transcendentalism in full bloom.

It begins with Alexander Pope, the 18th-century poet whose estate, Twickenham, became a sort of pre-Romantic theme park. (It had, among other attractions, a grotto covered with shells, mirrors and crystals.) At the Morgan you can see an autographed manuscript of Pope’s “Epistle to the Earl of Burlington,” which coined an excellent phrase for tasteful landscaping: respecting the “genius of place.”

Pope wasn’t talking about genius in the modern sense; he meant a kind of essence or spirit of the land. This idea found a somewhat ridiculous expression in the hermitage, a shelter often inhabited by a hired “hermit” (or, for the less wealthy, a mannequin). You can see one in Gijsbert van Laar’s “Storehouse of Garden Ornaments,” a book of engravings that catalogs various faux ruins and dwellings.

Pagodas, mosques and Italian villas were also popular garden features. At times the Romantic landscape could be a bit of a hodgepodge, as suggested by a 1763 etching of Kew Gardens titled “A View of the Wilderness, With the Alhambra, the Pagoda and the Mosque.”

The show takes an especially incisive look at the Picturesque movement, epitomized by the architect Humphry Repton. Repton and his peers shaped estates as if they were constructing landscape paintings, with an eye to foreground, middle ground and background.

The Morgan has several of Repton’s “Red Books,” polished presentations he used to woo clients. Each picture has watercolor overlays that lift up to reveal the before and after: removing a clump of trees here, adding a lake there.

Some Britons found Repton’s approach too doctrinaire. The Picturesque was pilloried in caricatures by Thomas Rowlandson and in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey.” (Henry’s impromptu hillside lecture on the Picturesque prompts Catherine to declare the city of Bath “unworthy to make part of a landscape.”)

Other Romantics, seeking shock and awe from their landscapes, turned to the sublime. One of the highlights of the show is a Turner watercolor, “The Pass at St. Gotthard, Near Faido,” from the Morgan’s collection. Turner gave this alpine scene an extra jolt of adrenaline by using the end of his brush to scratch whitecaps onto the churning river. His efforts were noted by the critic John Ruskin, who made his own sketch on-site after retracing Turner’s footsteps.

There’s more from England, including drawings by Samuel Palmer and an early printing of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” but the show is only halfway through. France, Germany and America share the second of two galleries, which demonstrate how British Romanticism mutated as it spread across the Channel and the Atlantic.

In France the Romantic landscape became the setting for a love story: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse.” It was also a royal folly, as in the hamlet of rustic buildings attached to Versailles for the amusement of Marie Antoinette. But Romanticism had a public, progressive side, too, in garden cemeteries like Père Lachaise and new parks commissioned by Napoleon III.

German Romanticism was darker and more folkloric, to judge from Goethe’s novel “Elective Affinities” and a moonlit scene by Caspar David Friedrich. For the Prussian Prince Pückler-Muskau, landscaping was an obsession — “Parkomania”— that led to bankruptcy.

Across the pond, Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists brought religion to the Romantic landscape. So did painters like Frederic Church, here represented by a panoramic study of Niagara Falls.

In his album “Picturesque America,” also on view, the poet and New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant cultivated a market for European-style landscape tourism (particularly in the West, newly accessible by the transcontinental railroad). Closer to home, Bryant’s newspaper laid the groundwork for Central Park.

The show ends with Olmsted and Vaux’s large “Greensward” plan, from the 1857 competition to design the park. Also on view are a pair of before-and-after presentation drawings showing views to and from Vista Rock; the “before” section consists of photographs by Mathew Brady.

Some of these fascinating materials are here because Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founding president of the Central Park Conservancy and the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies, conceived the exhibition and was its co-organizer. (She had help from John Bidwell, the head of the Morgan’s printed books and bindings department, and Elizabeth S. Eustis, a faculty member in the Landscape Institute of the Boston Architectural College.)

In the “Greensward” plan you can see how Olmsted and Vaux adapted ideas from Repton, Ruskin and other Romantics to fit an urban environment. Bridges over sunken transverse roads allowed carriages to pass above workaday traffic, and dense plantings along the perimeter made the park look endless. Pope put it best: “He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds/Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds.”