The Dutch Hermitage Folly (1760-1850) in a European context: Origins, Architecture, and Meaning of the Hermit’s Hut in the Landscape Garden

The phenomenon of a hermitage in a landscape garden has not yet been studied from a transnational historical perspective. In this article we present a European architectural history of the hermitage, paying special attention to Dutch hermitages mentioned in digitised newspapers and other historical sources. The long European history of the hermitage shows that this 18th-century landscape garden folly does not, as is often believed, have an exclusively English origin. The Dutch examples affirm this, although they depart from the standard hermitage narrative in generally being neither royal nor... Mehr ...