Following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, young English noblemen began traveling the continent in what became known as the Grand Tour. Along the way, the came across Italian landscape painters, and went home dreaming of turning England into little Italy.

Maggie Lane writes, “The desire was awakened to create landscapes equally beautiful of their own grounds in England. There was also a political aspect of the question, the idea that as England had escaped the tyranny of the French political system, so she should throw off the rigidity and prescription of the existing Versailles-type layout and strike out something new for herself.”