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(1) William Andrews Nesfield
(b Chester-le-Street, Co. Durham, 19 Feb 1794; d London, 2 March 1881). Painter and garden designer. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge University, he served in the army from 1809 to 1816, both in Spain during the Peninsular War and in Canada during the War of 1812, retiring as a lieutenant. He then took up watercolour painting with some success, exhibiting at the Old Water-Colour Society, London, between 1823 and 1851. His works, mainly landscapes (examples London, BM, V&A, and elsewhere), were the result of numerous tours, particularly in Wales, Scotland and Yorkshire. John Ruskin was among his admirers. Following the marriage of a sister in 1826 to the architect Anthony Salvin, Nesfield turned to garden design, establishing himself as one of the most influential practitioners of the mid-Victorian era. For his collaborative work with Salvin at several country houses, as well as with various other architects, including Edward Blore and Charles Barry, Nesfield revived the fashion for parterres de broderie, a principal feature of 16th- and 17th-century gardening. Formed out of low box hedging and coloured gravels, they were seen as particularly appropriate for new houses built in the style of the Elizabethan or Jacobean Revival, such as Blore’s Worsley Hall (1837–43, destr.), Lancs, for which Nesfield borrowed from early 17th-century French Baroque patterns. He also used such schemes for the garden terraces of houses built at other times and in different styles, including William Kent’s Palladian-style Holkham Hall (begun 1734), Norfolk, where in the 1850s matching parterres were laid out around the newly acquired St George and the Dragon fountain by Charles R. Smith (1798–1888). Massive sculptural groups provided the central focus for several of Nesfield’s other gardens, particularly in the 1860s, including the Atlas fountain at Castle Howard, N. Yorks—originally made by John Thomas for the Great Exhibition, London, in 1851—and Perseus Saving Andromeda by James Forsyth (1827–1910) in the gardens at Witley Court, Hereford & Worcs (house destr.). Nesfield’s greatest undertaking, the arcaded and canalized gardens (c. 1861, destr.) at the Royal Horticultural Society’s premises in South Kensington, London, was compromised and unpopular. Successful surviving examples of his work on a more modest scale include the maze he laid out at Somerleyton Hall (late 1840s), Suffolk, and the diminutive garden, terrace and sculpted basin at Broughton Hall (late 1850s), N. Yorks.
Part of the Nesfield family
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