Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

by Ingrid Fetell Lee

But for a group of evolutionary theorists, the startling consistency of the Most Wanted paintings has a different significance. Not only is this type of landscape common in artwork, they point out, but it also appears in real-life contexts, from the celebrated English gardens created by Lancelot “Capability” Brown to the urban parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, such as Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City. People often go to great lengths to transform a piece of terrain into one of these landscapes. For example, to create their beloved parks, Brown and Olmsted cleared trees, planted grasses, dug ponds, and sculpted earth. In Central Park alone, Olmsted oversaw the movement of 2.5 million cubic yards of rock, soil, and clay. These landscapes aren’t exactly native. Instead, they bear a striking resemblance to another part of the world, one that most of the designers and artists creating them had never visited: the African savanna.