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Lancelot "Capability" Brown | |
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_-_Capability_Brown_-_NPG_6049_-_National_Portrait_Gallery.jpg) | |
| Born | Lancelot Brown Kirkharle, Northumberland, England |
| Baptised | 30 August 1716 |
| Died | 6 February 1783(1783-02-06) (aged 67–68) London, England |
| Occupations | |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 8 |
Lancelot "Capability"Brown (born c. 1715–16, baptised 30 August 1716 – 6 February 1783)[1] was an English gardener andlandscape architect, a notable figure in the history of theEnglish landscape garden style.
Unlike other architects includingWilliam Kent, he was a hands-on gardener and provided his clients with a fullturnkey service, designing the gardens and park, and then managing their landscaping and planting. He is most famous for the landscaped parks ofEnglish country houses, many of which have survived reasonably intact. However, he also included in his plans "pleasure gardens" with flower gardens and the newshrubberies, usually placed where they would not obstruct the views across the park of and from the main facades of the house. Few of his plantings of "pleasure gardens" have survived later changes. He also submitted plans for much smaller urban projects, for example the college gardens alongThe Backs atCambridge.
Criticism of his style, both in his own day and subsequently, mostly centres on the claim that "he created 'identikit' landscapes with the main house in a sea of turf, some water, albeit often an impressive feature, and trees in clumps and shelterbelts", giving "a uniformity equating to authoritarianism" and showing a lack of imagination and even taste on the part of his patrons.[2]
He designed more than 170 parks, many of which survive. He was nicknamed "Capability" because he would tell his clients that their property had "capability" for improvement.[3] His influence was so great that the contributions to theEnglish garden made by his predecessorsCharles Bridgeman andWilliam Kent are often overlooked; even Kent's championHorace Walpole allowed that Kent "was succeeded by a very able master".[4]
Lancelot Brown was the fifth child of aland agent and achambermaid, born in the village ofKirkharle,Northumberland, and educated at a school inCambo until he was 16. Brown's father, William Brown, had been Sir WilliamLoraine’s land agent and his mother, Ursula (née Hall[5]), had been in service atKirkharle Hall. His eldest brother, John, became the estate surveyor and later married Sir William's daughter. His older brother George became a mason-architect.
After school Lancelot worked as the head gardener's apprentice at Sir WilliamLoraine's kitchen garden atKirkharle Hall until he was 23. In 1739 he journeyed south to the port ofBoston,Lincolnshire.[6] Then he moved further inland, where his first landscape commission was for a new lake in the park atKiddington Hall,Oxfordshire.[7] He moved toWotton Underwood House,Buckinghamshire, seat of Sir Richard Grenville.[8]
In 1741[9] Brown joinedLord Cobham's gardening staff as undergardener atStowe Gardens,Buckinghamshire,[1] where he worked underWilliam Kent, one of the founders of the new English style oflandscape garden. In 1742, at the age of 26, he was officially appointed Head Gardener, earning £25 (equivalent to £4,900 in 2023) a year and residing in the western Boycott Pavilion.
Brown remained at Stowe until 1750. He made the Grecian Valley at Stowe under William Kent's supervision. It is an abstract composition of landform and woodland. Lord Cobham let Brown take freelance work from his aristocratic friends, thus making him well known as a landscape gardener. As a proponent of the new English style, Brown became immensely sought after by thelanded families. By 1751, when Brown was beginning to be widely known,Horace Walpole wrote somewhat slightingly of Brown's work atWarwick Castle:
The castle is enchanting; the view pleased me more than I can express, the River Avon tumbles down a cascade at the foot of it. It is well laid out by one Brown who has set up on a few ideas of Kent andMr. Southcote.
By the 1760s he was earning on average £6,000 (equivalent to £1,036,000 in 2023) a year, usually £500 (equivalent to £86,300 in 2023) for one commission. As an accomplished rider he was able to work fast, taking only an hour or so on horseback to survey an estate and rough out an entire design. In 1764, Brown was appointedGeorge III's Master Gardener atHampton Court Palace, succeeding John Greening and residing at the Wilderness House.[8] In 1767 he bought an estate for himself atFenstanton in Huntingdonshire fromSpencer Compton, 8th Earl of Northampton and was appointedHigh Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire for 1770, although his son Lance carried out most of the duties.[10]
It is estimated that Brown was responsible for more than 170 gardens surrounding the finest country houses and estates in Britain. His work endures atBelvoir Castle,Croome Court (where he also designed the house),Blenheim Palace,Warwick Castle,Harewood House,Chatsworth,Highclere Castle,Appuldurcombe House,Milton Abbey (and nearbyMilton Abbas village), Marden Park (now Woldingham School) and in traces atKew Gardens and many other locations.[11][12]
His style of smooth undulating grass, which would run straight to the house, clumps, belts and scatterings of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers were a new style within the English landscape, a 'gardenless' form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of previous formally patterned styles.
His landscapes were at the forefront of fashion. They were fundamentally different from what they replaced, the well-known formal gardens of England which were criticised byAlexander Pope and others from the 1710s. Starting in 1719, William Kent replaced these with more naturalistic compositions, which reached their greatest refinement in Brown's landscapes.
AtHampton Court Brown encounteredHannah More in 1782 and she described his "grammatical" manner in her literary terms:"'Nowthere' said he, pointing his finger, 'I make a comma, and there' pointing to another spot, 'where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.'"[13] Brown's patrons saw the idealised landscapes he was creating for them in terms of the Italian landscape painters they admired and collected, as Kenneth Woodbridge first observed in the landscape atStourhead, a "Brownian" landscape (with an un-Brownian circuit walk) in which Brown himself was not involved.
Perhaps Brown's sternest critic was his contemporaryUvedale Price, who likened Brown's clumps of trees to "so many puddings turned out of one common mould."[14]Russell Page, who began his career in the Brownian landscape ofLongleat but whose own designs have formal structure, accused Brown of "encouraging his wealthy clients to tear out their splendid formal gardens and replace them with his facile compositions of grass, tree clumps and rather shapeless pools and lakes."[15]
Richard Owen Cambridge, the English poet andsatirical author, declared that he hoped to die before Brown so that he could "see heaven before it was 'improved'." This was a typical statement reflecting the controversy about Brown's work, which has continued over the last 200 years. By contrast, a recent historian and author, Richard Bisgrove, described Brown's process as perfecting nature by "judicious manipulation of its components, adding a tree here or a concealed head of water there. His art attended to the formal potential of ground, water, trees and so gave to English landscape its ideal forms. The difficulty was that less capable imitators and less sophisticated spectators did not see nature perfected... they saw simply what they took to be nature."[citation needed]
This deftness of touch was recognised in his own day; one anonymousobituary writer opined: "Such, however, was the effect of his genius that when he was the happiest man, he will be least remembered; so closely did he copy nature that his works will be mistaken."[citation needed] In 1772, SirWilliam Chambers (though he did not mention Brown by name) complained that the "new manner" of gardens "differ very little from common fields, so closely is vulgar nature copied in most of them."[16]
Capability Brown produced more than 100 architectural drawings,[17] and his work in the field of architecture was a natural outgrowth of his unified picture of theEnglish country house in its setting:
"In Brown's hands the house, which before had dominated the estate, became an integral part of a carefully composed landscape intended to be seen through the eye of a painter, and its design could not be divorced from that of the garden"[7]
Humphry Repton observed that Brown "fancied himself an architect",[18] but Brown's work as an architect is overshadowed by his great reputation as a designer of landscapes. Repton was bound to add: "he was inferior to none in what related to the comfort, convenience, taste and propriety of design, in the several mansions and other buildings which he planned". Brown's first country house project was the remodelling ofCroome Court,Worcestershire, (1751–52) for the6th Earl of Coventry, in which instance he was likely following sketches by the gentleman amateurSanderson Miller.[7]
Fisherwick, Staffordshire, Redgrave Hall, Suffolk, andClaremont, Surrey, were classical, while at Corsham his outbuildings are in aGothic vein, including thebathhouse. Gothic stable blocks and decorative outbuildings, arches and garden features constituted many of his designs. From 1771 he was assisted in the technical aspects by the master builder Henry Holland, and by Henry's sonHenry Holland the architect, whose initial career Brown supported; the younger Holland was increasingly Brown's full collaborator and became Brown's son-in-law in 1773.
Brown's reputation declined rapidly after his death, because the English landscape style did not convey the dramatic conflict and awesome power of wild nature. A reaction against the harmony and calmness of Brown's landscapes was inevitable; the landscapes lacked thesublime thrill which members of theRomantic generation (such asRichard Payne Knight andUvedale Price) looked for in their ideal landscape, where the painterly inspiration would come fromSalvator Rosa rather thanClaude Lorrain.
During the 19th century he was widely criticised,[19] but during the twentieth century his reputation rose again.Tom Turner has suggested that the latter resulted from a favourable account of his talent inMarie-Luise Gothein'sHistory of Garden Art[20] which predatedChristopher Hussey's positive account of Brown inThe Picturesque (1927).Dorothy Stroud wrote the first full monograph on Capability Brown, fleshing out the generic attributions with documentation from country house estate offices.
Later landscape architects likeWilliam Sawrey Gilpin would opine that Brown's 'natural curves' were as artificial as the straight lines that were common in French gardens.[21] Brown's portrait byNathaniel Dance, c. 1773, is conserved in theNational Portrait Gallery, London. His work has often been favourably compared and contrasted ("the antithesis") to the œuvre ofAndré Le Nôtre, the Frenchjardin à la française landscape architect.[1][22] He became both "rich and honoured and had 'improved' a greater acreage of ground than any landscape architect" who preceded him.[1][21]
A festival to celebrate the tercentenary of Brown's birth was held in 2016. TheCapability Brown Festival 2016[23] published a large amount of new research on Brown's work[24] and held over 500 events across Britain as part of the celebrations.[25] Royal Mail issued a series of Landscape Stamps[26] in his honour in August 2016.
The Gardens Trust with support fromHistoric England, publishedVulnerability Brown: Capability Brown landscapes at risk[27] in October 2017 to review the issues facing the survival of these landscapes as well as suggested solutions.
A commemorative fountain inWestminster Abbey’s cloister garth was dedicated for Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown after Evensong on Tuesday 29 May 2018 by theDean of Westminster, DrJohn Hall. The fountain sits over an old monastic well in the garth. It was designed byPtolemy Dean, the Abbey'sSurveyor of the Fabric, and was developed with the assistance of gardenerAlan Titchmarsh. The fountain was made in lead by sculptor Brian Turner.[28]
On 22 November 1744 he married Bridget Wayet (affectionately called Biddy) fromBoston, Lincolnshire, inStowe parish church.[29] Her father was analderman and landowner while her family had surveyors and engineers among its members. They had eight children: Bridget in 1746,Lancelot (known as Lance), William (who died young), John in 1751, a son in 1754 who died shortly afterwards, Anne who was born and died in 1756, Margaret (known as Peggy) in 1758 and Thomas in 1761.[30]
In 1768 he purchased the manor of Fenstanton inHuntingdonshire in East Anglia for £13,000 (equivalent to £2,180,000 in 2023) from Lord Northampton. This came with two manor houses, two villages and 2,668 acres of land.[31] The property stayed in the family until it was sold in lots in 1870s and 1880s. Ownership of the property allowed him to stand for and serve asHigh sheriff of Huntingdonshire from 1770 to 1771.[32] He continued to work and travel until his sudden collapse and death on 6 February 1783, on the doorstep of his daughter Bridget Holland's house, at 6Hertford Street, London while returning after a night out at Lord Coventry's.[33]
Horace Walpole wrote toLady Ossory: "Your dryads must go into black gloves, Madam, their father-in-law, Lady Nature’s second husband, is dead!".[34] Brown was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul, the parish church of Brown's small estate atFenstanton Manor.[35] He left an estate of approximately £40,000 (equivalent to £6,080,000 in 2023), which included property in Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire.[36] His eldest daughter Bridget married the architectHenry Holland. Brown sent two of his sons toEton. One of them, Lancelot Brown the younger, became the MP forHuntingdon. His son John joined theRoyal Navy and rose to become an admiral.
Many of Capability Brown's parks and gardens may still be visited today. A partial list of the landscapes he designed or worked on includes:
More than 30 of the gardens are open to the public.[44]
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Media related toCapability Brown at Wikimedia Commons
