Founded in 1778 by Helena Radziwiłłowa.
The architectural and garden setting was developed by Szymon Bogumił Zug with great personal involvement and participation of the duchess. Architectural ideas were sketched by Jan Piotr Norblin and Aleksander Orłowski, which were implemented until 1797 by Zug, and later by Henryk Ittar. The duchess began to establish the garden in the spring of 1778, but she continued to develop and compose it for over twenty years, until her death in 1821. The first buildings to be built on the shore of the great Arcadian pond, which was dammed in 1781, were the Cascade and the Cottage by the Waterfall (1781), and a little later the Temple of the High Priest (1783) and the Temple of Diana (1783-1785) with a ceiling by Norblin depicting the Morning Star, and the Aqueduct (1784). In the years 1785-1789, a symbolic Tombstone of the Duchess was built on Poplar Island with an ambiguous Latin sentence Et in Arcadia ego, modeled on the Tomb of Jean Jacques Rousseau in Ermenoville, as well as the Grotto of the Sibyl built of field stones, the rustic Cottages of Philemon and Baucida, the Stone Arch, the Corner of Melancholy, the Gate of Time, the altar circle on the Island of Offerings. In the 1990s, the expansion of Arcadia continued under Zug's direction. At that time, the House of the Murgrave adjacent to the Stone Arch and the Gothic House above the Grotto of the Sibyl were built. In the last years of the passing century, the interior of the Etruscan Cabinet was decorated in the Temple with a neoclassical interior and paintings by Michał Płoński and Aleksander Orłowski.
Around 1800, the Duchess turned towards the aesthetics of a romantic garden. At that time, the garden in Arkadia expanded from the small and previously closed area of the sentimental park to the surrounding vast fields located behind the Skierniewka River, freely incorporating viewing axes and new buildings into the vast space of the surrounding natural landscape. The Duchess's bold intentions from that time were implemented in Arkadia by a young romantic visionary, an extremely talented architect of the new generation, Henryk Ittar. At that time, the Tomb of Illusions (1800) was built on the Champs Elysees located behind the river, the Roman Circus (1803) and the Amphitheatre (1804). A little later, the folk Swiss House was built, concealing fairy-tale "crystal interiors" (1810), which the Duchess located among the buildings of the Arcadian village.