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Lancelot "Capability" Brown
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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CHAPTER FOUR hardwoods, flowering shrubs from Asia. Romanticism, with all that the term implies in art and sentiment, was to flourish at Stourhead as in the nation as a whole. A tempest between advocates of the "picturesque" and those of the "gardenesque" was soon to dominate the writing and practice ofestate design. Some, who in earlier times would have devoted themselves to the arts and the "improvement" of their parks, turned instead to the sciences, to new agricultural enterprises, or to interests in emerging industrial technology. By 1785 when Henry Hoare died, the humanist tradition that had influenced the design of landscape gardens from the beginning of the Renaissance was in decline and largely over. LANCELOT "CAPABILITY" BROWN William Kent may be the father of modern landscape gardening and the link between the eighteenth century and the garden art of an earlier period, but it is Lancelot Brown who is the most famous practitioner of the art as it evolved. Although some gardeners, scholars, and landscape architects know of Kent's existence and a smaller number are aware ofwhat he actually did, entire generations ofEnglish children know about Lancelot Brown. Known as Capability Brown because ofhis habit of announcing that an estate or piece ofland possessed certain potential or "capabilities" that could and should be developed, he is lionized like Francis Drake, King Alfred, and Dick Whittington as a self-made man and one of the architects of the nation. Brown's fame and Kent's relative obscurity are partly due to the fashionable surge of activity in park construction that swept England in the eighteenth century, providing Brown with the opportunity for numerous commissions, and partly due to the personality differences between the two men. Although as gregarious as Brown, Kent is reputed to have been somewhat lazy and is known to have detested traveling, preferring to spend his time at the houses and estates of his friends in and about London. Brown, on the other hand, was a tireless and ambitious worker, endlessly traveling from one project to another, even when ill and elderly. We know this from numerous letters from clients beseeching him to come to their estates, while his own letters constantly refer to juggling dates and visits, trying to fit them all in. There is, too, the difference in their gifts. Kent's work was finely wrought, at times almost precious or small in scale. It appealed to intellectuals. Brown's work and reputation didn't possess much in the way of literary underpinnings. From the start he worked at a larger scale, composing parks with a thorough knowledge ofconstruction and horticulture gained in his youth in the north. Virtually none of his work relies on a circuit or itinerary, and none has the layers of meaning associated with the work of Kent or Hoare. The parks of Brown, as exemplified by Petworth and Blenheim, are a watershed in social order, sensibility , and art. Visually, formally, and to a degree ecologically, they are the last wave of the humanist love affair with pastoral artifacts and manners. At the same time, the age of a formal abstract art, stripped ofliterary and historical allusion- of an art that deals primari- LANDSCAPE GARDENS AND PARKS ly with formal problems within its own particular medium - had begun. In his own lifetime Brown was accused of producing vapid and inhuman landscapes, enormously monotonous and dependent on a single formula - the same charges used to attack other, more recent artists, especially in our own time, those considered to be the most abstract or minimalist. Contrary to popular myth, Brown did not begin as an apprentice in the kitchen gardens at Stowe and work his way up to become head gardener, only then to be launched on a great career after being befriended by Kent and Temple. Instead, as is often the case, the real facts are at least as interesting and better help to explain his remarkable achievements. Born in 1716 in Kirkharle, Northumberland, near the Scottish border, Brown was fairly well educated in village schools, leaving at age sixteen to go to work for the largest landowner i[l the valley, Baronet William Loraine. This nobleman had been active in local and national politics until middle age. After 1720 he began to withdraw to spend more time on his estate. Like many of his friendsĀ· and contemporaries in London and neighboring Yorkshire, Loraine was interested in improving his property in the fashion of the times. Acting as his own architect...