Our Debt to Capability Brown

Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–1783)

There was much celebration in Britain in 2016 on the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot “Capability” Brown, but very little recognition in Australia. Why is Brown worth our attention today?

First, because he has been described as one of the most remarkable characters of an era of remarkable men.[1] Second, because of some interesting resonances with the art of the twenty-first century. Brown was, one might say, the man who moved landscape from painting into nature and nature into art. He had an extraordinary imagination which saw the landscape very much as the minimalist Earth Art sculptors do today. His work was “as much graphic art as gardening”.[2] Third, and most important, this one man probably influenced what we see in every public park in Northern Europe, North America and the British Commonwealth more than any other single person.[3] And this has a significant influence on our lives today. As Penelope Hobhouse puts it: “The private sanctum of the eighteenth-century landowner has today become the city-dweller’s green breathing space.”[4]

Lancelot was an appropriate name for someone who had the dash and daring to change the face of the English cultured landscape forever. He was renowned for saying, when asked to view a property, that it had “capability” for improvement. No one has been able to determine when he first said that. The nickname was not used during his lifetime, they say.[5] But his eldest son Lance was called “Capey” at Eton so it may have been in circulation if not used to his face.[6]

Brown was a reserved person who, while sociable and known for his humour, if not flippancy, committed few of his thoughts about his work to writing and apparently was taciturn about it outside his family. We know a fair bit about his travels and various projects from correspondence and his surviving account book. But that only dates from 1764. His family correspondence reveals him as a loving husband and father but says little about his vision or aspirations. We know little about his personal life, despite his prominence for three centuries.

Jane Brown tells us that, late in life, he opened up to a remarkable woman client, Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, who helped organise and lead the Bluestocking Society. Jane Brown says she gave him “the blessed habit of self-awareness, and the ability to talk of what he did although it was so late”.[7] A few months before he died in early 1783 another able woman, Hannah More, encountered him at Hampton Court and reported a remarkable conversation. She says, “I passed two hours in the garden the other day as if it had been April with my friend Mr Brown. I took a very agreeable lecture from him in his art, and he promised to give me taste by inoculation.” [8] We shall return to that fascinating conversation.

Apparently what papers Brown left behind were given by his son to his major successor, Humphrey Repton. Sadly they have disappeared. But many fine plans survive in the homes of the families he so well served.

 

His early years

 

Born in 1715 at Kirkharle, near Wallington in Northumberland, Brown learnt the rudiments of building, land management and gardening as a youth. His brother was the agent at the nearby estate, Kirkharle Hall, and arranged for him to have an apprenticeship. He had remained at school until the age of seventeen—unusual for those times—and thus had a sound basic education. At Kirkharle Hall, he was obviously spotted for his potential. He and his brother were generously given the run of Sir Walter Loraine’s library at the Hall. We have no idea what he read but it is reasonable to assume that he read a good deal of material about gardening and architecture.

In his early twenties Brown moved south and had the good fortune to be employed in 1741 at perhaps the most important new garden in Europe at the time, the groundbreaking Buckinghamshire estate of Lord Cobham at Stowe. William Kent (c.1685–1748) was the presiding genius at Stowe—a painter turned garden designer and architect—who had absorbed much from his time in Italy and the encouragement of Lord Burlington, Palladian enthusiast and leader of the neo-classicists. While Kent was now ill and not often at Stowe, Brown learnt much from him and was careful to implement his designs. Brown obviously earned the confidence and respect of the very demanding Lord Cobham, one of the Duke of Marlborough’s most successful generals in the recent conflicts with France.

Brown was gradually promoted—at the age of twenty-five he had forty men working for him. As perhaps the only person on the estate without a military background it is a tribute to his steadiness and personal charm that he was able to manage men so well. In 1746 he was put in charge of the Grecian Valley project, his major contribution to Stowe.

Some 24,000 cubic yards of soil were moved: the equivalent of 1631 London double-decker buses. It was meant to enclose a small lake but somehow the water would not stay. Nevertheless it is still regarded as one of the most elegant parts of the estate. Kent died in 1748, by which time Brown was head gardener and clerk of works. He had the good fortune to implement architectural designs by the renowned architect James Gibbs who, aged sixty, was known for being a good teacher. Under his influence Brown created fifteen pages of notes on architectural definitions. Once again he had the privilege of the use of Lord Cobham’s library.

Lord Cobham recommended him to his gardening friends and soon Brown was commissioned to create or modify gardens all across the country. When Cobham died, Brown decided to freelance. He was never again in the employ of a single person. But it was a risky way to live, especially as he was now married with children. It was all dependent upon him and his health—which was not always good. He had a long-standing chest problem which led to asthma. He was prone to debilitating attacks of pleurisy and retching coughs but said it was “only occasional and unless it be excited by labour or cold, gives me no molestation, nor does it lay very close siege to life”.[9] This stoic view of life was characteristic.

What did Brown look like? He was a tall, well-built man with brown curly hair and whimsical grey eyes. He had a ruddy face from so much time outdoors. He was well known for his Lincoln-green waisted riding coat with high collar and deep pockets, his white stock and tricorne hat.

He pursued clients by riding to their homes all across the country. (Surely only John Wesley rode more. Wesley is said to have ridden over 200,000 miles and preached 40,000 sermons: he said the world was his parish.) When the Duke of Leinster offered Brown 1000 pounds late in life to come over to Ireland he declined, saying, “ I have not finished England yet!”

As his reputation grew to astonishing heights, envy generated a certain social “put down” in some circles. Some families would not employ him. Although he was close to King George III, especially after he became Master Gardener to the King in 1764, living at Hampton Court, some members of the royal family would not employ him.

Nevertheless he was overrun with work from the outset, due to a network of connections for which Lord Cobham was initially responsible. It was probably the most distinguished and unique collection of employers England has ever seen, including the King, six prime ministers, over eighty peers and almost all the wealthiest commoners in the land. [10]

We would say he played his cards close to his troublesome chest. But he had no options. He was building a clientele amongst the most favoured 400 families in the land—all on incomes of 10,000 to 15,000 pounds per annum. Multiply that by close to 100 (for today’s equivalent) and you can see that he had to mind his ps and qs.

Dorothy Stroud, his first major biographer, estimates that he was involved in at least 211 gardens before he died in 1783. Scholars now increase that to over 250.[11] He modified no less than 200 square miles of England. More than 100 of these gardens survive, almost intact, to this day. They remain the style background to most public parks around the globe.

What was the world like in which Brown was working? What cultural and social circumstances made him so quintessentially the right man in the right place at the right time? The reasons are sociological, economic, agricultural, industrial, political, scientific, philosophical, aesthetic and religious.

To take the last first. Brown’s contemporaries were still in weary reaction to the disastrous impact of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. Royalists were still reeling from the Civil War and the execution of a King. Puritans had been in hiding since the next King, Charles II, came along. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Catholics were mostly in retreat.

Those with estates had fled to them and devoted themselves to the pursuit of peace and piety, often looking for a glimpse of paradise. But they were also deeply concerned for the “improvement” of their properties and so encouraged an agricultural revolution. This was made possible by the enclosure of common lands, ending the medieval system of strip farming—all with disastrous effects on the poor. Landowners sought success and profit.

With all religious passion spent, leading philosophers spurned ideology and sought to elevate reason with the inevitable British orientation towards pragmatism. The focus was on the empirical and the here and now of what could be observed. It is no accident that this is the period of the beginnings of modern science.

New discoveries in engineering, especially hydraulics, would make a great deal of difference to Brown’s capabilities. Vast improvements in roads and transport helped to make Brown’s travels possible.

Overseas, Protestant Britain was involved in a series of drawn-out wars with King Louis XIV’s Catholic France for global domination. The Renaissance formality of French garden design had become unpopular in Britain and indeed unpatriotic. Formal gardens stood for royal absolutism and the British people had firmly turned their back on such tyranny. Besides, such gardens were becoming too expensive to maintain, because they were so labour-intensive.

Britain won these conflicts eventually and the British Empire was born in the mid-eighteenth century. As a result vast sums of money were coming from the colonies into the pockets of the prominent and powerful. They gave many landowners the opportunity to indulge in fabulously expensive makeovers.

A new aesthetic was emerging. You could say it was more relaxed. Poets like Alexander Pope and the philosophers were calling for something more natural, more English and more sympathetic to the undulating English countryside.

The “regularity” of the formal garden was being replaced by a feeling for “irregularity”, for variety and surprise. Crucial to that was the delight in the serpentine “S” shape which by 1753, when Hogarth published The Analysis of Beauty, had become the ultimate criterion. There was a sense of minimalism in this new aesthetic, as John Dixon Hunt has pointed out[12]. No doubt that is part of the secret of Brown’s astonishingly long appeal and influence in garden design. It was more in tune with nature, which had become less threatening as human beings began to exercise more control over the environment.

At this time landscape painting and the still life were becoming accepted as legitimate artistic genres. Alexander Pope wrote: “All gardening is landscape painting. Just like a painting hanging up.”[13]

 

William Kent and Brown at work

 

William Kent was trained as a painter and became a landscape designer. Brown was trained as a gardener and became a landscape architect. Our word landscape comes from the Dutch word landskip, which was originally used for a painting, specifically what we would call the landscape genre.[14] Brown never referred to himself as a landscape designer or landscape architect. He spoke of “place-making”.[15] It was apparently Humphrey Repton who invented the phrase “landscape gardening”.[16]

Kent was one of the designers who saw themselves creating an outdoor version of what the great French landscape painters of the late seventeenth century produced. He was the Englishman par excellence, who turned painting into landscape. Brown would then turn landscape into art.

Brown was not really interested in the rich symbolism of the style Kent represented. Nor was he interested in the Whig political morality Lord Cobham was expressing at Stowe. He was more interested in making the most of the landscape as it presented itself. Like Alexander Pope he was careful to “consult the genius of the place in all”.

As Hobhouse says:

Brown’s parks did not depend on literary allusions or allegory. Instead, working on a grand scale, his ideal was to improve the roughness of nature, blotting out any imperfections, and retaining those elements producing the sensation of beauty, as defined by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757.[17]

For Burke, beauty could be expressed ideally in a landscape park.[18]

Brown had the practical bent and the rational spirit of his generation. Kent at Stowe had focused on the creation of gardens in what was understood as the classical Greco-Roman model. He and his contemporaries moved away from the highly geometric gardens of the French and Dutch traditions to a more free-flowing style. This respected the existing environment while introducing a range of buildings and artefacts which could also reflect admiration for the classical tradition, especially as presented through the works of artists like Claude and Poussin.

 

Brown’s methods

Brown was a surveyor, engineer, architect and gardener. But above all he was an artist. He had a three-dimensional imagination which, after a relatively brief walk or reconnaissance ride around an estate, could rule on what capabilities the place offered. Of course sometimes it had little or none, and he was not afraid to say so. This honesty and integrity endeared him to many of his clients—and no doubt infuriated others!

Brown’s focus on the fundamentals of land, trees and water gave him a simple formula which he could apply to almost any situation. But no one else in his day could do it with the same apparent ease and panache. His training as a gardener gave him a great feeling for flowers, fruit, plants and trees. He used a smaller range of them than his successors: the astonishing influx of new overseas species which began in the early 1700s seems barely to have touched his choices. But he used them brilliantly to “punctuate” his designs.

This brings us back to that fascinating conversation at Hampton Court recorded by Hannah More. If only we had more of the two-hour “lecture”! She wrote:

He told me he compared his art to literary composition. “Now there I make a comma (pointing with his finger), and there where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, when an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.”[19]

Those who are admirers of the work of the Australian painter Fred Williams might hear an echo of his work here with the highly expressive “marks” he used to catch the eye.

Brown’s developing architectural skills gave him confidence to design all manner of decorative buildings. But he did not depend on them for his designs. No doubt he learnt a good deal working with his architect son-in-law, Henry Holland, as they offered a complete service for creating a new estate with house, garden and associated facilities.

He did articulate nine commandments—or ingredients—for the completion of a successful project. 1. A good plan. 2. Good execution. 3. A perfect knowledge of the country and the objects in it, whether natural or artificial. 4. Infinite delicacy in the planting etc. 5. So much beauty depending on the size of the trees and the colour of their leaves to produce the effect of light and shade so very essential to the perfecting of a good plan. 6. Hiding what is disagreeable. 7. Showing what is beautiful. 8. Shade from the large trees. 9 Sweets (scent) from the smaller sorts of shrubs etc.[20] It sounds simple and straightforward but the magic was in the execution.

 

Characteristics of Brown’s style

 

I borrow here some pointers from the English National Trust website.

First is his love of the serpentine stream and lake. He loved water in the middle distance. No doubt he loved the reflected light which enlivened any landscape. But it also moved with the winds and a variety of colours would appear. He would bring grass to the edge of the water rather than trees. He would clump them to break the view and make the eye move around them. Sometimes he would create an island in the middle of a lake with a clump of trees to do that. Wallington in Northumberland is a good example. Brown was aware of the delicious visual effects created on water by special weather conditions like frost or mist.

Second, he frequently used a woodland belt to enclose a private world. It need not be very deep but enough to block out unattractive features on the horizon and, if possible, provide shelter and cover for game for the shooting season. Ashridge House in Hertfordshire shows this.

Third, the introduction of a picturesque stone bridge was always an eye-catcher. These bridges were placed to break up the view of parts of the lake (or what have been called the rivers that are not rivers) to titillate the eye. They were often meant to be crossed by carriages and placed in such a way that the viewer on arrival would be driven across the water as well as around it, getting tantalising glimpses of the great houses which were the destination.

Fourth, the ha-ha, the old version of what we know as the cattle grid. It prevents grazing stock from entering certain areas. Sheep and cattle are not welcome in formal gardens or amongst young trees because they eat them. The ha-ha is a cutting in the landscape, sometimes walled, providing an invisible barrier (without interrupting the long view) which protects the foreground of the new landscape and provides the romantic sense of domestic fauna in the background, thus creating the classical bucolic environment immortalised by Claude and Poussin. It also panders to that irresistible urge in the landed Englishman to eschew vulgar display and help him believe that what he is doing with his land is both useful and commercially sensible.

No one seems to know when the ha-ha was invented but it probably derives from French military installations. It is still very effective. It enabled Brown and others to create a sweeping uninterrupted view from a house across manicured lawn to the paddocks and tree clumps strategically placed. The name is supposed to come from the experience of a person encountering the feature and emitting a “ha-ha” of surprise.

Fifth, those strategically placed trees and clumps of trees. Brown had a particular penchant for the cedar of Lebanon. He also loved the London plane. He tended to place clumps on hillocks which provided some height variety and drama in gentle rolling countryside. They were fenced off when young and manicured by stock grazing once established. Petworth in West Sussex is enriched by this treatment.

Sixth, the monuments, temples, rotundas and follies (some of them designed by himself) which adorned his gardens were invariably exquisite or at least eye-catching. Although he had not been on the “grand tour” himself, most of his clients had. Their nostalgia was an inevitable source of fashion statements. The monuments were usually backed by a clump of evergreens for clear definition. Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire shows a good example.

Seventh, Brown was noted for his undulating valleys. His most famous contribution to Stowe was the creation of the Grecian Valley. All this was done with spade, barrow and horse-drawn cart!

Eighth, Brown always brought the lawn right up to the house. This may not seem to be important but it was actually a revolution. For a couple of hundred years the parterres in front of the house were the main focus of the garden. The Italian and French (and also Dutch) models were dominant. This area was where one wandered, usually in company, promenading and admiring the beds of flowers and decorative bushes. Brown undoubtedly saved his clients a great deal of money in maintenance—parterres are extraordinarily expensive to maintain.

Grass up to the house made it seem autochthonous—that it actually grew out of the soil as a natural part of the environment. As the sandstone often came from the site, so its massing in a house seemed a “natural” evolution.

Finally, the grand sweeping drive was a feature of his designs. Ickworth in Suffolk is a fine example. No one was to see the grand house in its full glory until they had picked up frequent tantalising glimpses on the way, around bends, through the trees, across the water, sometimes just a flicker. The destination was found and lost, found and lost—all at frustratingly slow carriage pace. The drama of the entrance was crucial: every guest had to be deeply impressed even before arrival. Every suitor or tradesman had to be suitably humbled. Come in, Jane Austen!

 

Petworth and Blenheim

These two remarkable places are variously claimed to be the greatest of Brown’s achievements. Petworth was one of his earliest major challenges. Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset, had brought in the royal gardener George London in the 1690s to create a formal landscape with ramparts, parterres, terraces, an aloe garden and a summer house. In the 1730s Daniel Defoe visited and said “its front has no vista answerable, the West front look’d not to the gardens but to the stables”. In the 1740s Jeremiah Miles thought the house was “situated in a bad place and front to a view that presents nothing”.

The second Earl of Egremont never expected to inherit Petworth but when he did he treated the house and park with creative respect. He asked Brown for help when Brown was still at Stowe (Brown had done good work for the Earl’s sister). The first contract was entered into in 1753.

Over five contracts and a decade Brown improved things a great deal. But he respected what was good when he started. For example, he kept almost all the old mature trees. Some of the hardwoods are still there today. He set out flower gardens for the Countess (ordering over 100 varieties) and introduced gravel paths to protect the Countess’s shoes. So much for the oft-repeated criticisms that Brown destroyed everything in his path! He did remove the parterres and brought the lawn up to the house. That involved a massive exercise in seeding. And he introduced an enormous number of trees, especially beeches and his favourite London planes. They would take a century to mature, but he was always planning for posterity.

His two big introductions were the lakes and the ha-ha to protect the beech wood from stock. He then introduced the serpentine walks through the trees. The gravel paths were hedged with flowering bushes. The first of the lakes was what is now called the Upper Pond and later the Lower Pond. He planted extensively, sheltering the road to Guildford and providing privacy. Then he introduced clumps of various sizes in strategic spots to enhance the view lines. A major improvement was moving the road to Midhurst. Initially it ran only 50 feet from the house. Now it is three-quarters of a mile away. New carriageways thus brought visitors around to the north side of the house, travelling around the side of a hill, giving a splendid view of two sides of the house. On the way they were tantalised by the glimpses they received through the trees.

The Upper Pond became a focus for birdlife, fishing and boating. An impressive boathouse and viewing platform were created—probably designed by Brown. Brown’s major achievement was that the 700-acre estate presented itself as a unified work of art with a pleasure park, a grazing park and endless delightful views wherever one walked or rode. The viewer had escaped a formal garden into a garden which now stretched to the horizon. Deer came right up to the house, and still do. The park is splendidly fenced with fine stone walls (like Blenheim).

Brown was not averse to “eye-catchers” in the form of sculptures or buildings but he had escaped the ideological fixation on Greco-Roman themes which was the dominant feature of Stowe. Perhaps the fact that he had not been on the Grand Tour helped him avoid that. There is continuing argument about whether he used these “eye-catchers” more or less as the years went by. He used few at Petworth but it probably depended upon each owner’s wishes. He used soil from the dredging of the lake to create an island which has an urn on top. The rotunda is probably a later addition after Brown had finished.

Brown was always mindful of the need for changing vistas seen from the house. The new sash windows available and larger areas of glass compelled people to look out. New usage of public rooms meant the piano nobile was a viewing platform. Moving from one room to another was a moving picture. The front of Petworth was 230 feet long with a myriad of windows.

One of the few things Brown ever said about his work was:

Gardening and Place-making when rightly understood will supply all the elegance and all the comforts which Mankind wants in the country and (I will add) if right, be exactly fit for the Owner, the Poet and the Painter.[21]

 

Blenheim

Blenheim was a much bigger challenge. A grateful Britain had built this vast baroque palace to Sir John Vanbrugh’s designs to thank the newly created Duke of Marlborough for his brilliant military successes over King Louis XIV, culminating in the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. The grounds had been laid out in military style with some dramatic axes, full-grown trees and a splendid three-arch bridge (with a centre span of 101 feet) but attempts to make something grand out of the little River Glyme as it moved through had been a failure. The Duke’s military engineer sought to develop a canal but this had not been completed. The hills were bare and the place was generally run-down.

The fourth duke, George, called for Brown’s help in 1763 (on the advice of Lady Cobham, who introduced them)[22]. Five years later work began—after Brown’s normal reconnaissance, followed by a professional survey and the presentation of a plan. A decade’s work from 1764 earned him more than 21,500 pounds—much of which went to his foreman and labourers and towards the planting of trees.

William Cowper wrote (The Task, Book III, 1785):

Lo! He comes,

Th’ omnipotent magician, Brown appears! …

He speaks. The lake in front becomes a lawn;

Woods vanish, hills subside, and valleys rise;

And streams, as if created for his use,

Pursue the track of his directing wand …

And so it was. Stroud [23] thinks that the great “honey-coloured mass of Vanbrugh’s palace, set on the crest of high ground, proved a spur to his genius”. Brown was certainly at the top of his form. He removed the original parterres—for which he was criticised, but that was very much in line with Vanbrugh’s vision. He had said that the north side was abysmally bare of features and the only things that would save it would be “buildings and plantations”. [24] Brown planted thousands of trees and designed a number of buildings. He removed the military rigidity of many of the alleys and softened the areas with clumps of trees. The great axis and Vanbrugh’s walled kitchen garden survived.

His stroke of genius was what he did with the river. First he exercised his extraordinary gift for managing water to create a fine deep lake. Where the River Glyme turned from the great lake he created a spectacular Grand Cascade and a smaller one lower where the Glyme reaches the Evenlode on its way to the Thames. Brown’s grasp of the principles of land drainage and canals was remarkable. He transformed the whole estate and decently covered the nakedness of Vanbrugh’s bridge. Thank God the towers originally planned to top the bridge were never built—they would have been totally out of proportion.

Thomas Jefferson was much impressed with the Grand Cascade but marvelled that 200 people were employed to maintain Blenheim, mowing all the grass every ten days. No wonder the family bemoaned the fact that the generous nation which had given the palace and estate had provided no income to care for it!

Even King George III was impressed. When he saw the 2500 acres of Blenheim he said, “We have nothing to equal this.” No wonder that Blenheim is now a Unesco World Heritage Site.

 

The last decade

In 1764 Brown at last received royal recognition. He was made Master Gardener at His Majesty’s Gardens and Waters at Hampton Court. Later he took St James’ Palace and Park in London under his wing. The family moved to Wilderness House at Hampton Court where they lived until Brown died in 1783. He became close to King George III. He was used by his great friend William Pitt the Elder as a go-between with the King, attempting to modify the King’s hard-line attitude to the American “rebellious colonials”.

By this stage Brown was a wealthy man. He began to realise that he must be better organised if he was to survive in business. He set up an office at Hampton Court and was served well by a series of able surveyors and staff. He opened an account with Drummond’s bank and started an account book, which has survived thanks to the good sense of a descendant (in it he lists King George under K). It reveals that by then his income (excluding his royal pension) was about 6000 pounds per annum. From that his costs would have been at least 3500. But remember that a seat in parliament cost 2000 pounds at the time, a parish rector received about 50 pounds per annum and a teacher less. Most of Brown’s clients would have been in the 10,000 to 15,000 pound per annum income bracket.

Always concerned about his family, Brown decided to invest what he had in the bank in real estate so that they would be secure after his death. He bought from a good client, Lord Northampton, the manor of Fenstanton in Huntingdonshire for 13,000 pounds and became a country gentleman. He never lived in the modest manor house.

In any event it soon involved him being appointed High Sheriff of the county—not a role he would wish to play with such a busy practice. Fortunately his eldest son, another Lancelot and now a young lawyer, was able to fill the bill.

When Brown died he left an estate of over 10,000 pounds, which would probably make him a millionaire in today’s money. On the transfer deed for Fenstanton, Lord Northampton wrote: “I take the Manor of Fen Stanton to belong to Lawrence [sic] Taste Esq., who gave Lord Northampton Taste in exchange.”[25]

 

How did he manage all this?

Brown’s genius lay primarily in his capacity to envisage the capabilities of a site, his courage in pursuing it, and his sensitivity to the forms in the landscape (which he sought to enhance, often at considerable effort and expense). His capacity to sculpt an environment which looked “natural” was in tune with the subtle rhythms of the English countryside, and while paying tribute to the past by way of keeping classical buildings or Gothic follies as features to catch the eye, was free of any didactic concern to spell out a philosophy or ideology. And he had the wisdom and humility to learn from his predecessors, especially Kent, and move quietly forward to a new synthesis which recapitulates all those elements which go to make up what we recognise as the English landscape tradition.

Brown seemed to relate easily to all levels of society. He dined regularly at the House of Lords but it never went to his head. While his famous contemporary Thomas Chippendale (1718–1779) was treated as an artisan, Brown was treated as a remarkable professional. He was described by Horace Walpole as a person of “wit, learning and integrity” and an “agreeable pleasant companion but a genius in his profession”. (Hobhouse, op.cit. p 223) He managed his staff well and in return they gave him long years of faithful service. In spite of the fact that he did not take fools kindly he was obviously a humble, affectionate man to whom both men and women were drawn.

He was always concerned for the betterment of his family, for “upward social mobility”. His family were from independent yeoman Northumberland stock. Iris Wedgwood wrote of his Redesdale forebears as people of “airy confidence” with the “manners and bearing of gentlemen and a store of knowledge far beyond farming matters”.[26] They all had ability. Two of his brothers married into the gentry and another was an admiral. His son Lance became an MP and finished up with an important role in the royal household. Thomas was ordained into the Anglican clergy. All the children who married “did well”, as we used to say.

As a designer he would probably have been sympathetic to the work of a number of twentieth and twenty-first-century land sculptors or installationists like Christo, Paul Sangha, Maya Lin, Robert Smithson, James Turrell and others who seek to mould the environment to create vast outdoor works of art—works that invite exploration and challenge the viewer to join the visual experience. There was a minimalism in Brown’s work which is echoed today. Vast amounts of soil and money were often involved but the purpose was to create an environment that appeared so simple and natural that art conquered nature in the interests of art. It was “softly, organically neutral”—just what anyone imagined the English landscape to be, or wanted it to be.[27] The Vercellonis write: “In the context of European culture, this was a completely new way of contemplating nature, for trees and scenes such as these were nowhere to be found in existing gardens.”[28]

His other genius lay in his capacity for what we would call “marketing”. He had a great gift for eliciting the confidence of his patrons, beginning with Lord Cobham. He persuaded them that they needed to leave a heritage for their successors in a century’s time. He enabled them to build and plant for a maturity which would far outlast them. The marvel is that so many of these gardens survive today and have set the generally-recognised model of what an English garden looks like, a model which is still also found throughout the US and British Commonwealth.

Brown has been described as the Norman Foster of the eighteenth century—rather like Britain’s most successful entrepreneur architect of the twentieth century. Brown was the complete designer, entrepreneur and salesman who offered comfort, economy and elegance. For decades he was the doyen of his profession. He died in 1783 after a dinner with one of his earliest and most faithful clients, Lord Coventry. Walking from the Earl’s house to his daughter’s he had some kind of apoplectic fit and died twenty-four hours later.

One of his clients, Richard Owen, had said publicly that he wanted to die before Brown and get to heaven to see it in its natural state before Brown got hold of it.[29] Some insight into Brown’s influence is found in King George’s comment to his Richmond gardener, Mellicant: “Brown is dead! Now, Mellicant, you and I can do here what we please.”

Horace Walpole, Brown’s long-time friend and admirer, wrote:

With one Lost Paradise the name

Of our first ancestor is stained;

Brown shall enjoy unsullied fame

For many a Paradise he regained.

 

He had moved landscape away from painting into a natural art form all its own.

 

 

Epilogue

Brown built on the work of his predecessors but effectively created a new profession. Unlike continental Europe, England in his day was a perfect environment for the self-made man of vision, energy and ability.

The art of gardening design and development is perhaps the most ancient and all-embracing art form known to humanity. The Bible tells us that it all began in a garden—and that it all ends in a garden. Environmentalism has become both a science and a religion today. The more we become conscious of the impact of our surroundings on our everyday lives, the more we become aware of ourselves and our values.

Frank Clark, writer of the delightful book The English Landscape Garden, suggested to his students that gardens are more important than Shakespeare or Milton as English gifts to Western culture.[30] Christopher Hussey supports that in his book The Picturesque, pointing out that only in England was a complete theory of outdoor design developed. And he shows how it flows into all the arts from poetry to painting, architecture to town planning[31].

Sarah Rutherford suggests that landscape design is arguably the greatest contribution Britain has made to the arts worldwide. Let Nikolaus Pevsner have the last word:

 

The great name in the history of the mid-eighteenth century is Lancelot Brown … His are the wide, softly sweeping lawns, the artfully scattered clumps of trees, and the serpentine lakes which revolutionised garden art all over Europe and America.[32]

 

We are all indebted to him.

 

Ian George is a former Anglican Archbishop of Adelaide.