A capriccio river landscape of the Giardino Inglese at Caserta, with cattle and reclining figures

The giardino inglese, or “English garden”, is a style of landscape design that incorporates both natural and artificial elements and presents an idealized view of nature. It emerged in England in the early 18th century and soon spread throughout Europe, supplanting the more formal, geometric jardin à la française of the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The giardino inglese that inspired this work was designed in 1792 by Luigi Vanvitelli (1700-1773) for the park at the Palazzo Reale di Caserta, just north of Naples. The present landscape incorporates the neo-Gothic tholos temple found at the center of the garden's maze, as well as a distant landscape redolent of the countryside near Volturno, but the lush, sprawling grounds have been depicted with some imaginative artistic license. As court painter in the employ of King Ferdinand IV of Naples from 1786 until 1797, Jacob Phillip Hackert would have been well acquainted with the gardens, and motifs of the giardino inglese reappear in several other paintings from that period, such as his River Landscape with Elements of the English Garden at Caserta of the same year (Attingham Park, Shropshire).