Hooray for 'Capability' Brown

Blenheim Palace (from 1764)  is often considered Brown's finest work

Next year marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Britain's greatest landscape designer, Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. Certainly his work was the apogee of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden, and I still maintain that if one applies the two Modernist maxims of 'Form follows Function' and 'Less is More' then Brow was not only the first Modernist landscape designer but also by far the most successful.

However in the 232 years since his death poor old Brown has come in mor more than his fair share of stick. In fact vitriol would be a more accurate word. A destroyer of formal gardens, a displacer of villagers are but two of the accusations used to beat him with.

And to our national shame Brown has been deliberately ignored or exorcised from various celebrations of British gardening and garden history. So thank goodness that he is now getting some of the much credit he is due.

Portrait of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, c.1770-75,
Cosway, Richard (1742-1821)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images.

Today sees the launch of the 'face' of the Capability Brown Festival 2016 . The portrait of the affable-looking chap himself is by Richard Cosway, probably between 1770 and 1775. 

The Festival has been has been funded by a £911,100 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund with the wider project worth in the region of £1.7million. Much of this represents match funding, and funding in kind, from the Festival’s partners and supporters. 

The website has a wholæe host of information about events, projects etc., etc, and here too you can sign up for the latest news.

There are more than 250 sites associated with Brown across England, with a small handful in Wales. They range from small private gardens to larger country estates, and include 12 public parks, some schools and hotels. Many are managed by members of the Historic Houses Association, the National Trust, and English Heritage. 

To find an example of Brown's visionary genius near you, check out this interactive map.

E is for English Landscape Garden

Brown's landscape at Longleat - more natural than nature

Many thousands of acres of downland Britain that we assume are ‘natural’ were, in fact, parts of carefully designed English landscape gardens created in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  The move away from the formal, French-inspired garden of the late 17th century towards a reappraisal of Nature was stimulated by the Grand Tour, innovative farming techniques, and Enclosure. 

Charles Bridgeman

The first ‘landscapist’ was Charles Bridgeman (d.1738), and his greatest contribution was the introduction of the sunken hedge or ‘ha-ha’.  

A ha-ha

This brought the broader landscape into the garden, which evolved not just as something to look at, but also to look through.  

William Kent

The pace of change was maintained by William Kent (1684-1748) - the subject of an earlier post - who further de-formalised the garden and created idealised, picturesque landscapes - works of art inspirited by the Classics and set within a tamed, sculptured Nature. 

Venus Vale at Rousham

However, it was the much-maligned Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-83) who created what has been described as Britain’s greatest contribution to world art. 

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown

His landscapes were wholly English in their character and inspiration, and Sir Horace Walpole perfectly encapsulated Brown’s work: ‘Such 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.’  

Blenheim Palace

I also argue that if you apply the maxim ‘form follows function’ Brown was the original Minimalist Modernist - a work of art composed of water, grass, trees and topography that simultaneously turned in a profit as a productive landscape.

Humphry Repton

Brown’s successor was Humphry Repton (1752-1818), who I call 'Practicality' Repton because he combined beauty with utility primarily by reintroducing the terrace, but as Industrial Revolution suburbia rose and gardening for the masses arrived, formality returned to the garden....

Sheringham Hall

If you want to experience these works of art here are some suggestions of gardens to visit.  There is no unadulterated Bridgeman garden extant, although Claremont in Surrey and Chiswick House in London retains elements. The latter was designed in co-operation with Kent with whom Bridgeman worked on several projects

The finest example of Kent’s work is Rousham in Oxfordshire.  Brown’s crowning glory is Blenheim Palace, also in Oxfordshire: and Repton’s ‘darling child’ is Sheringham Hall in Norfolk.

This is a link to a feature on Georgian Gardens.

D is for Druids Cave

Queen Caroline's Hermitage at Richmond Lodge

Bit of an odd one for today's garden feature. But that's such a part of the fun of garden history - all the weird and wonderful that happened in our gardens, and the reasons why it happened.

During the 18th century and as a part of the movement towards the new, naturalistic English Landscape style there was considerable revival in antiquarian interests.  There was a re-rediscovery of the Classics - literature, architecture and archaeology.  However, this interest in things ancient was not restricted to Italy and Greece, and there was a lively curiosity with the early history of Britain and its inhabitants.  One area of particular fascination was the mysteries of the druids.

Originally called the Hermit's Hut, Killerton's  Bear Hut was erected in 1808.  Attribution: David Smith

As with many of the Classical rediscoveries which were played out in the new landscapes, in the form of picturesque natural scenery, emotional overtones and garden buildings, so too the interest in druids took physical form.  Many new gardens created from the 1720s onwards were embellished with a druid’s cell or cave, a term often also given to a rustic structure or hermitage.  

Dido's Cave at Stowe, a 'classisised' Druid's Cave. Attribution: Philip Halling Smith

Built from stone or wood - the use of tree stumps and roots was popular, although Classical embellishments were also used, it was important that the druid’s cell or hermitage was inhabited by a hermit or druid.  In most instances models made of waxworks, straw stuffed clothes, or clockwork sufficed, but occasionally a ‘live-in’ hermit was employed.  For example by the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton in Gloucestershire - click here for image of the hermitage.  Here, the hermit’s role was to live alone, to appear bedraggled, and to terrify visitors.  However, Beaufort fired his hermit for enjoying female company and for moonlighting on other nearby estates. 

The Stowe Hermitage by William Kent, 1731

Stowe also has a hermitage but the building is in classical style.  Here too, the resident hermit was sacked - this time for drunkenness.

William Kent, The Picturesque Landscape & Rousham

The English Landscape Garden is arguably one of Britain’s greatest contributions to world art.  And while many garden lovers have heard of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’ (1716-83) not so many are familiar with his predecessors such as William Kent (c.1685-1748).

Put simply, Kent designed idealised landscapes with softened edges, sinuous walks, water features, many varied buildings and long prospects where garden and park were indistinguishable.  As Horace Walpole put it, Kent ‘leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’

Yet the scenes Kent created were not English but took their inspiration from Italy, from the romantic images of classical times.  These landscapes were designed to be a picture, a work of art laden with emotional overtones of tranquillity, gaiety, grandeur and melancholy, all set within a tamed, sculptured Nature. 

The noted garden historian, Professor Tim Mowl offers an insight onto Kent and his work on this video of his 2010 Claremont Garden History Lecture.  Here is part one (of seven):

Here are the additional six parts of the lecture.

However, it is not easy to visit a Kentian landscape because his works were overlaid by successive incarnations of the English landscape garden.  Most often by ‘Capability’ Brown.

A most notable exception is Rousham in Oxfordshire.  

Admittedly the landscape has suffered the ravages of time and lack of cash, yet it fully retains both its layout and emotional harmonics - and oftentimes you find you are the sole visitor!
 

For those who wish to read more, try Simon Pugh’s ‘Rousham and the English landscape garden’.

And for comparison, Blenheim Palace, perhaps the finest example of ‘Capability’ Brown’s landscaping work is a mere 7 km from Rousham.