Background
Coffin was born on March 20, 1918, in New York City, the son of H. Errol Coffin and Lois Robbins.
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Completing a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 1940, he returned to complete a Master of Fine Arts in 1947 and a Ph.D. in 1954 after World War II.
(More so than other Europeans, the English have turned to ...)
More so than other Europeans, the English have turned to their gardens or wooded "wildernesses" for contemplative consolation. To explore the meditative aspect of English garden-making, David Coffin combines selected poetry, diary extracts, letters, and more formal writing from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries with charming illustrations and his own perceptive commentary. The English saw the impermanence of life in "weather-beaten heads" of flowers that "not seun dayes before had flourished in their full prime," and their gardens were often decorated with sundials and ruins. Addressing both admirers of the English garden and students of English cultural history, Coffin shows that the English emphasis on transience was a key to their gardening and their literary style.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069103432X/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(From the late Middle Ages, when it embodied spirituality,...)
From the late Middle Ages, when it embodied spirituality, through the end of the eighteenth century, when it offered pleasurable surroundings for banquets, poetry readings, and amorous pursuits, the garden figured prominently in everyday Roman life. In this lavishly illustrated history, David Coffin provides a wealth of information on how Italian gardeners worked with the elements of color, fragrance, sound, shade, architecture, sculpture, and wildlife to achieve a wide variety of sensual effects. In so doing he presents the stages of evolution in classic Italian gardening, which was replaced in the late eighteenth century by the more naturalistic English style. Coffin first considers the role of cloistered gardens in the Middle Ages and shows how they were later incorporated as private spaces within the larger Renaissance gardens. Describing the introduction of sculptural collections and waterworks into gardens during the sixteenth century, he explores some of the rich, often complicated, iconographical programs that emerged. The extension of garden parks in the seventeenth century marks the diminishment of architecture in landscaping and the advent of landscape design as a dominant factor. Throughout this book Coffin concentrates on the garden as a site for entertainment and on the development of design components that eventually permitted gardens to be freely open to the public.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691040893/?tag=2022091-20
Coffin was born on March 20, 1918, in New York City, the son of H. Errol Coffin and Lois Robbins.
Completing a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 1940, David Coffin returned to complete a Master of Fine Arts in 1947 and a Ph.D. in 1954 after World War II.
Coffin served in the U.S. Army during World War II. His academic career began at the University of Michigan, where he taught for two years before finding a post at his alma mater as a lecturer in art and archaeology in 1949. He would remain at Princeton for the rest of his career, being appointed a full professor in 1960 and Howard Crosby Butler Memorial Professor of the History of Architecture in 1970; he also chaired the art and archaeology department from 1964 to 1970 and was heavily involved in plans for the renovation of the Marquand Library of Art and Architecture.
Coffin retired as professor emeritus in 1988, occupying his time with writing, as well as a year as Kress Professor at the CASVA National Gallery of Art from 1995 to 1996. Highly respected for his knowledge of Renaissance architecture and gardens, he was the author of such books as The Villa d'Este at Tivoli, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, The English Garden: Meditation and Memorial, and Princeton University's Graduate College. His last book, a biography of Pirro Ligorio, was completed but not yet published at the time of his death.
(From the late Middle Ages, when it embodied spirituality,...)
(More so than other Europeans, the English have turned to ...)
1994
Coffin married Nancy Merritt Nesbit on June 10, 1947. The couple had four children: Elizabeth, David Tristram, Lois, and Peter.