More from The Times Literary Supplement (2008)

One of three co-founders and now sole editor and publisher, Patrick Eyres has stamped his personality on the feisty, visu­ally distinctive and intellectually robust New Arcadian Journal, which takes as its primary battleground the cultural politics of eighteenth-century historical landscapes, and especially their man-made iconography. Adding a modern resonance are disquisitions on garden works by contemporary artists, notably the late Scottish garden-maker, artist and concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay …

Originally a quarterly, NAJ has evolved into a compact double issue around a single theme, published annually in a numbered edi­tion limited to 300 copies. Image and text confidently complement each other, from the bright, single-colour covers and contrasting flyleaves, to the starkly black-and-white illus­trations in a variety of styles that happily mix pointillist bird’s-eye panoramas (by Chris Broughton); fluid, John Piperesque line draw­ings of structures, foliage and occasional interiors (by Catherine Aldred); rapid archi­tectural doodles (by Mark Stewart); carefully observed statues (by the sculpture conserva­tor, Andrew Naylor); and vignettes of (preferably salacious) art and architecture by Howard Eaglestone, who lists his interests as “sex, shipping and gliders”. These and other artworks proclaim NAJ’s core qualities: eclec­tic, obsessive, bellicose (war planes flying low over Georgian statuary is a very New Arcadian image), and refreshingly original in its determination to offer a modern and highly particular reading of old landscapes. Even vanished garden layouts are redrawn afresh.

Sex and gardens is a recurring theme, most obviously in the millennium issue (2000, volume 49/50), ‘Gardens of Desire’, which took as its focus Sir Francis Dashwood’s notoriously licentious landscapes at West Wycombe and neighbouring Medmenham Abbey, eschewing straight garden history for a more embattled engagement with “the sexu­ality of the Georgian garden and the variety of positions offered by … ‘laddish’ modes of interpretation”. Prompted by the architectural historian Dan Cruikshank’s challenge to the National Trust to stop sanitizing its Georgian gardens, Patrick Eyres set the tone in his edi­torial: pugnacious polemic underpinned by rigorous scholarship. Two contributors then played around with this theme: first, the clever and laddish Richard Wheeler, who used his long experience as National Trust regional land agent to unearth antecedents at Stowe for Dashwood’s bawdy garden fea­tures, among them a Mound of Venus “quite biological in its architectural detail”. Next came the perceptive and determinedly unlad-dish cultural historian Wendy Frith, who introduced the wider backdrop of eig­hteenth-century sexual politics, which saw aristocratic excess increasingly challenged by bourgeois moderation. Howard Eaglestone reconstructed with relish the lost Medmenham statues, while Andrew Naylor injected a professional conservator’s view on the reclamation of Georgian lead sculpture, originally painted to resemble marble, in an appendix entitled ‘Upgrading Erections’.

The current issue (2008, volume 63/64) returns to the journal’s Yorkshire roots and the Georgian Landscape of Wentworth Castle, under restoration as a “major site of Georgian political and aesthetic modernity; indeed, as a national treasure”. Eyres likes nothing better than a good scrap, and at Went­worth the rivalry was familial as well as polit­ical, concerning a disputed inheritance and subsequent skirmishing … between the neighbouring estates of Wentworth Castle and Wentworth Woodhouse. As a mark of NAJ’s continuing interest in the restoration, Eyres introduces multiple viewpoints from six different contributors (including himself), who combine the journal’s familiar polemic with a more traditional exposition of early eighteenth-century wildernesses by the aca­demic and landscape design consultant, Jan Woudstra …

Jennifer Potter, TLS,  31 October 2008