John Dixon Hunt is an English 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 many articles , 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, his Critical Commentary on Shakespeare’s "The Tempest", studies of Marvell, Ruskin, and William Kent, his classic Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination: 1600–1750, Greater Perfections, Picturesque Garden in Europe, and The Afterlife of Gardens, A World of Gardens and The Making of Place: Modern and Contemporary Gardens.
Early life
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.
Education
Bristol Grammar School
He earned his BA and MA at King's College, Cambridge.
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, which focuses on the relationship between the visual and the verbal, and Studies in the History of Gardens and Other Designed Landscapes. 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. He became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and served as the department chair of landscape architecture and regional planning until June 2000. In June he went on sabbatical to pursue his interests in landscape architectural theory. When he returned Dean Gary Hack left for his sabbatical therefore leaving his position as Dean temporarily available and John Dixon Hunt was named to fill the position for a semester. John Dixon Hunt is a member of the Graduate Groups in PhD architecture, historic preservation, history of art, comparative literature and Center for Italian Studies Committee.
Examples of his writings and thoughts
Hunt defines landscape architecture as exterior place-making and sees the garden as having a 'privileged position' within landscape architecture because gardens 'are concentrated or perfected forms of place-making.'
"The use of the term 'picturesque' today is generally limp, gesturing at best towards something visually attractive, perhaps old, quaint or scenic."
"Picturesque is the story that concerns the application of painterly art to the formation of gardens and landscapes; but understanding, presentation and augmentation of 'nature' in designed landscapes, and about their reception by all sorts of visitors, topics just as important in the annals of landscape architecture as a debt to painting."
Books
The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination: 1848–1900
His Critical Commentary on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”
The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century, Baltimore and London:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976
John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, The Genius of the Place, London: Paul Elek, 1975.
John Dixon Hunt and Michel Conan, Tradition and Innovation in French Garden Art, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Michael Leslie and John Dixon Hunt, A cultural history of gardens, London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Articles and Book Chapters
'Emblem and Expressionism in the Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4, 3, 1971, pp. 294–317.
'Marvell, Nun Appleton and the Buen Retiro', Philological Quarterly, 59, 1980, pp. 374–8.
'Pope's Twickenham Revisited', Eighteenth Century Life, 8, 2, 1983, pp. 26–35.
'Pope, Kent and 'Palladian' gardening', in G.S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 121–132.
'Verbal versus Visual Meanings in Garden History: The Case of Rousham', in John Dixon Hunt, Garden History: Issues, Approaches and Methods, Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1989, pp. 151–181.
Ut Pictura Poesis': The Garden and the Picturesque in England ', in Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot, The Architecture of Western Gardens: A Design History from the Renaissance to the Present Day, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT PRess, 1991, pp. 231–242.
'Experiencing gardens in the Hypnerotomachia Polifili', Word & Image'', 14, 109–119, 1998.
