Botanica Atlanta - Landscape Design, Construction & Maintenance

Image: William Hogarth

William Hogarth was a jack-of-all-trades. In his lifetime, he was known throughout England for his beautiful paintings, his biting political satire, and for his wide range of written work. When Hogarth wrote The Analysis of Beauty, he was trying to isolate a universal standard of what exactly is attractive to the human eye. In the book, his process of discerning a single quality that is present in all beautiful things involved a painstaking and laborious investigation of everyday objects. By “everyday objects,” I of course mean those items that were part of daily life when Hogarth was writing his book, which was way back in 1753.

Image: William Hogarth

Analysis is rich with illustrations, and Hogarth guides the reader through tedious analyses of the lines found in men’s wigs, candlesticks, flowers, and even women’s corsets. He concludes from each of these detailed discussions that of all of the lines that we see, it is the gently curving line (numbered “4” in the above engravings) that makes objects beautiful. He calls this line the “Line of Beauty.”

Image: William Hogarth

Though it was written almost three centuries ago, Hogarth’s book is full of eye-opening and surprisingly shrewd observations. For example, take the case of a typical living room. Whether it was built in 1753 or 2011, construction methods are ruled by right angles and straight lines, and, as a result, most rooms have flat walls and sharp corners. Hogarth wisely points out that, despite a room’s inherent rectilinearity, we human inhabitants tend to fill these spaces with curving lines. We carry in a rounded entourage of lamps, couches, and tables, and we even ornament a room’s corners and seams with curved moldings.

Hogarth’s point is a simple one. Yet it was so revolutionary in its time that it inspired a measurable shift in the world of garden design. In the decades after Analysis was written, landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers notes that English garden designers showed a “complete abandonment of straight lines in favor of the continuous S-curve known as Hogarth’s line of beauty.”

Image: Mark Duff

It is my opinion that Hogarth’s final argument, that beauty can only be found in curves, was overreaching and too simplistic. Based on my own experience, it is unfair to the straight line to say that beauty cannot be created without curves. To name just a few examples, beauty can found in such curve-less compositions as the obeliscal Washington Monument, the stacked horizontal planes of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, or the Egyptian Pyramids at Giza.

Images: Sam Valentine

Hogarth was certainly onto something though, and that is the absolute correlation between the curving line and beauty. Perhaps the best evidence of this correlation that I have seen with my own eyes is San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. By function, the structure is required to offer a straight, flat road surface of over a mile in length. Aesthetically, though, it is the gently curving lines formed by the bridge’s suspension cables that make it a thing of beauty.

William Hogarth argued that there is a universal attractiveness in waving lines, and I cannot help but agree with him. I believe that curves have natural, intrinsic beauty and that the human mind is naturally attracted to the serpentine lines that are found on a human face, followed along a winding garden path, or perceived in the form of a flower.

Image: William Hogarth

By Sam Valentine, BLA, LEED AP