John Dixon Hunt

John Dixon Hunt is an English-born landscape historian. His work particularly focuses on the time between the turn of the seventeenth through the end of the 18th centuries in France and England. Professor Hunt began his academic career teaching English literature. He is the author of innumerable articles [not only in landscape journals but also Apollo, Lincoln Center Theater Review, and Comparative Criticism], and chapters on topics including T. S. Eliot and modern painting, Utopia in and as garden, and garden as commemoration. He has written numerous books which include The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination: 1848-1900 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), his Critical Commentary on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” (Macmillan 1968), studies of Marvell, Ruskin, and William Kent, his classic Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination: 1600-1750 (J. M. Dent, 1986), Greater Perfections (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), Picturesque Garden in Europe (Thames & Hudson, 2002), and The Afterlife of Gardens (Reaktion Books, 2004), A World of Gardens (Reaktion Books, 2012) and The Making of Place: Modern and Contemporary Gardens (Reaktion Books, 2015).

In his youth he walked extensively in the mountains of the English Lake District and in Switzerland, and spent time with his maternal grandfather, Frank Dixon, a school headmaster and entomologist. His parents moved to Bristol from his native Gloucester so that he could attend Bristol Grammar School. Hunt's father Sydney led a company of amateur actors, and Hunt envisioned a career on the stage for a period of time. He won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, and studied English literature, completing a B.A. and M.A. there, followed by a Ph.D. at Bristol University.

He began his career with teaching positions in English literature with emphasis on its relationships with the visual arts at the University of Michigan, Vassar College, Exeter, York, Leiden, East Anglia, Bedford College, London and then Dumbarton Oaks where he was the Director of Studies in Landscape Architecture. His route to the study of landscapes began with his research into the 18th-century of Alexander Pope and a trip to Stowe, where he toured the grounds for several days with the history master of the boys' school there. Hunt has founded two prestigious academic journals: Word & Image (since 1985), which focuses on the relationship between the visual and the verbal, and Studies in the History of Gardens and Other Designed Landscapes (1981, originally Journal of Garden History). He has also held a number of fellowships ranging including a tenure at the American Academy in Rome and has advised on Venetian garden restoration and botanical garden interpretive programs. (University of Pennsylvania)

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