C O N T E X T 1 4 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 6 33 Architecturally speaking In praise of Capability Brown Anniversaries celebrating the lives of famous historical figures can be a little over-done. In some cases, one suspects that the associated celebrations are merely a clever marketing tool for already well-known places and products. Celebrating the lives of famous people does have its place, though, and in architectural and landscape history does present the opportunity to re-examine men and women of great singularity. If anyone is worthy of this description it is Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and if any anniversary is worth noting and celebrating, it is his. Born in 1716 (hence the revived interest this year), Brown lived until 1783. In his 53-year career he ricocheted from country estate to country estate, changing the face of Georgian England as he went. His landscape projects took an average of four years to complete, but at some sites he was involved for over two decades, visiting and re-visiting, designing and re-designing to great visual effect. In his lifetime he was known to have shaped 200 estates, but the current figure of commissions and attributions has exceeded 300.1 Among his landscapes are Blenheim, Chatsworth, Burghley, Harewood, Croome, Petworth, Highclere and Richmond Royal Park. Lancelot Brown, the fifth child of Ursula andWilliam Brown, a yeoman farmer, started his working life as an apprentice under-gardener at Kirkharle Hall in 1732, aged sixteen. By 1742 he had become head gardener at Stowe. It was during his time as a gardener that he learned his trade: how to successfully propagate trees, control bodies of water through hydraulic systems and, most important, see the possibilities in a landscape. This last was a skill untaught and all his own. Humphry Repton, widely regarded as Brown’s successor, talked about his ‘natural quickness of perception’. A self-named ‘place-maker’, Brown had a way of recognising the ‘capabilities’ of a site (hence his nickname) and of visualising aesthetic change on truly vast scale. Such was the confidence in him that aristocratic landowners gave Brown carte-blanche to sweep away entire villages and paid for armies of labourers to bring about the changes he could already see in his mind. Brown’s natural mode of working was to capitalise on existing resources at the estates where he was commissioned. He employed existing flocks of sheep to ‘puddle’ the compacted bottoms of his new serpentine lakes, before re-employing them to graze the newly rolling landscapes he had created, making an Elysian parkland without importing a single animal. In a revolutionary break with the established Franco-Dutch layouts of the 17th century that had long-dominated garden design, Brown would strip away formality, creating instead open expanses of green pasture, punctuated with belts of forest and river-like lakes. He would remove or soften formal canals, manually shift many thousands of tonnes of earth to create rolling swards instead of the flat, predictable lawns that people had become used to, and transplant acres of existing mature woodland for instant drama. In an age of fast horse-drawn carriages such as curricles and post-chaises, Brown introduced circuit rides that ‘weaved in and out of woodland with a proto-cinematic quality’.2 He was the grandmaster of surprise, using carefully positioned indigenous planting, exotic trees and sinuous lines to maximise the visual drama of his landscapes, which could be appreciated from the carriage, on foot and as a backdrop to country houses, some of which houses he had a hand in designing. Brown was skilled at borrowing natural existing features, and opening up vistas to distant hills and far-off viewpoints. He was not in the least perturbed if an estate lacked natural features or viewpoints; with great flexibility of mind and adaptability of vision, he simply created them. Seemingly no task was too great for him. Since he created beauty and drama wherever he was commissioned, waxing lyrical about Brown is a very easy exercise. Of course, this was often at the expense of a different type of beauty, either a natural landscape or a formal garden that may have already existed at a place. It is worth taking a moment here to consider that our own modernday interpretations of palimpsest, where we value every layer of significance that has gone before, would have seriously hindered Brown’s visions, making his work impossible at many of the sites where he excelled. Brown had no such inhibitions or concerns over past achievements and styles, and certainly Longleat seen from Heaven’s Gate, its parkland landscaped by Capability Brown (Photo:Tim Mowl)
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