Constance Mary Villiers-Stuart (''née'' Fielden, 1876 – 1966) was an English author and water-colour painter.
Biography
Villiers-Stuart was brought up at
Beachamwell Hall
Beachamwell is a village and civil parish in the Breckland district of Norfolk, England about south west of Swaffham and east of Downham Market. It has four ancient churches, two of them in ruins. The former parish of Shingham has been anne ...
in Norfolk and studied painting in Paris,
then married Patrick Villiers-Stuart, a soldier, in 1908 and moved to India, allowing her to collect material for her 1913 book, ''Gardens of the Great Mughals'' which launched the historical study of
Mughal Gardens.
Chapter XII, on 'Some garden contrasts and a dream' urges respect for Indian design traditions. The 'dream' in the chapter title concerns the design of
New Delhi. Her pleas for an Indian town plan had little effect but she had a conversation with
Edwin Lutyens
Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens ( ; 29 March 1869 – 1 January 1944) was an English architect known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era. He designed many English country houses, war memori ...
and he read her book. Both Lutyens and the viceroy,
Lord Hardinge, were impressed with her ideas which was important as they were designing the new capital city for India and the Viceroy's palace.
Working with
Gertrude Jekyll
Gertrude Jekyll ( ; 29 November 1843 – 8 December 1932) was a British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote ...
had given him a sympathy for garden design and the result was the famous Mughal Garden of what is now
Rashtrapati Bhavan.
References
Sources
British Library collection summary*Prior, Mary Ann 'An Impulse of Genius', Country Life, 12 September 2018, pp 100 – 104
External links
Gardens of the Great Mughals by C.M. Villiers StuartOnline text.
Official government website.
See also
*
History of gardening
1877 births
1966 deaths
20th-century English painters
20th-century English women artists
English women non-fiction writers
English watercolourists
British women painters
English non-fiction outdoors writers
Women watercolorists
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