Lancelot Brown

English architect

• Born: August 30, 1716 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Kirkharle, Northumberland, England
• Died: February 6, 1783
• Place of death: London, England

Building on the pioneering work of William Kent, Brown perfected the “natural” school of landscaping. Using only arranged trees, water, and lawns, the natural school sought to transform the estates of the English gentry into vast prospects that, while appearing to be the work of nature, were meant to be superior, aesthetically, to anything created by nature.

Early Life

Lancelot Brown’s nickname, Capability, came from his habit of speaking, as he rode his horse over an estate, of an estate’s “capabilities” for improvement under his hands as a landscaper. He was born in a remote area of northern England sometime in 1716. Little is known of his family. Presumably, his father was a yeoman farmer. One biographer, Thomas Hinde, conjectures, on the basis of various bits of circumstantial evidence and a local tradition, that Brown was the illegitimate son of the local squire, Sir William Loraine. Brown attended school until the age of sixteen, far beyond the age customary for lads of his social class. His education, together with his native intelligence, served him well all of his life, giving him the mathematics necessary for his profession and enabling him to consort easily with the great figures of the age.

After his schooling ended, Brown worked locally as a gardener. It was in this early period that he learned the essentials of his profession: the use of tools, the raising of young plants and transplanting of mature ones, the draining of marshy areas, and in general, a sense about plants and what they can do for a landscape. Already in this early period of his life, he began to practice landscaping, in which his great talent, indeed genius, soon became apparent.

Brown’s ambition and drive led him to leave Northumberland and move south when he was only twenty-three years old. He soon took employment in Stowe, the historic seat of the Grenville family, and in the twentieth century was one of the great English public schools. Stowe was already famous in England in the eighteenth century for the beauty of its garden and landscaping. According to legend, Brown began as a lowly kitchen gardener, but modern authorities believe that his skills as a landscaper were already known when he was taken on at Stowe. In a short time he was head gardener. At Stowe he implemented William Kent’s designs and thereby mastered the principles of this great innovator in the art of landscaping. As Brown’s reputation grew, aristocrats began to “borrow” him to work on their own estates. By 1751, Brown’s reputation was such that he was able to move to London and set himself up in business as a landscaper for the wealthy English gentry.

Already in his youth he showed those features of personality and character that played so large a role in his career. He was scrupulously honest, there being in all of his many business dealings only two known occasions when he and his customers quarreled over a bill. Sometimes clients voluntarily paid Brown a bonus to show their appreciation for the good work he had done. Although of very humble origins, he moved easily in the highest levels of society, even becoming a valued companion of King George III. Horace Walpole wrote with a kind of amused respect that “Mr. Brown’s flippancy diverted one, the first peer that experiences it laughs to conceal his being angry at the freedom; the next flatters him for fear of being treated as familiarly; and ten more bear it because it is so like Brown.”

He was an affectionate husband and devoted father, giving his sons an excellent education and extending to at least one daughter a freedom of choice unusual in the eighteenth century in choosing a mate. His employees esteemed him. Intelligent, humorous, calm, loving, self-confident—and a genius in his field—Brown was a paragon of a man.

Life’s Work

When the eighteenth century began, the English were slavishly copying the French geometric garden, of which Versailles, designed by André Le Nôtre, is the prime example. This kind of garden, reflecting the Scientific Revolution’s belief that humans could master nature, was laid out in rigid geometric shapes, all arranged in perfect symmetry. The straight line, least likely to be found in nature, predominated.

The natural landscape is, in a sense, also the progeny of the Scientific Revolution in that it shows humans in harmony with a nature that, with the advent of scientific understanding, need no longer be feared. Some authorities trace the taste for the natural landscape to Chinese influence, while others, pointing to passages in the work of Joseph Addison and other eighteenth century writers, insist that the idea is wholly native to England. Perhaps the most judicious conclusion is that the eighteenth century English gentry saw in Chinese gardens something for which it was already seeking. Probably the continental landscape painters played a role also by influencing English landscapers to create in reality what the painters had created on their canvases, an image of nature actually better than anything nature, unaided by humans, could do.

In general, the elements of the designed “natural” landscape, a scene that would come to be known as the picturesque, are as follows: First, the park is bounded at a great distance by an encircling belt of woodland, which excludes from sight any agricultural land, but which can be opened to allow a glimpse of a distant object, perhaps a ruin, of pictorial interest. The inner belt of trees is irregular, receding or projecting according to the contours of the land. Specimen, that is, individual trees, and clumps of trees, the clumps varying greatly in size, add diversity to the view. The middle distance is enlivened by water, its source added if necessary. Great sweeps of grass connect all the elements. All lines are curved. The beauty is enhanced by the generous English rainfall, which keeps the grass green.

The modern observer is struck first by the enormous labor involved. Created before modern power machinery, the parks were made by hundreds of laborers employing shovels, carts, and wheelbarrows. On occasion, as at Chatsworth, an entire hill was removed from the setting so that the view would correspond to Brown’s vision. Flat areas were transformed into contours. To change the course of a river was an ordinary task in Brown’s eyes. Lakes were formed by digging out the depression and then puddling clay, so that the water would not be lost by seepage. Formal gardens, no longer in fashion, had to be ruthlessly destroyed to make way for the new park. Hedgerows, too, were swept away. New trees were brought in by the thousands. Brown insisted that the trees be native species, with special use made of oaks, beeches, chestnuts, birches, and elms. He used evergreens intensively, for contrast with the paler greens of the deciduous trees and for winter color. All the colors had to be native to Great Britain, thus excluding the bluish tints of various North American conifers.

Lawns were created, not by employing turf, but by planting hayseed. The grass was cut by men wielding scythes and by grazing sheep, kept from the area of the house by the “haha,” or fosse, a trench that would not interrupt the line of sight from the house, as would a fence or hedgerow. Modern Brown lawns, now more than two-hundred years old, contain an extremely wide diversity of plants. The lawns run smoothly into the rivers or lakes, which were not to have reeds or brambles along their edges, since these would interrupt the continuity of view.

The exact number of parks created by Brown cannot be determined because of faulty records, but they number more than one hundred. Many, fallen victim to neglect, have reverted to a more “natural” state. Others, fortunately, are intact. A prime example of a Brown park still in existence is Blenheim, the seat of the dukes of Marlborough. Brown expended probably his greatest efforts on this park, and it is generally regarded as the epitome of his achievement. Blenheim Park is a superb example of the design effect known as “surprise.” Coming from the urban setting of Woodstock, one steps through an archway and at once encounters an astonishing picture, composed of the lake, the great vistas, the lawns, the thousands of trees (arranged in forest belts, clumps, and as individuals), and finally the great palace, framed by the “natural” landscape. Part of the transformation required the radical altering of the small Glyme River; Brown gave it the proportions and curved outline of a large river, and then pridefully commented, “Thames, Thames, you will never forgive me.”

The whole park takes up 2,700 acres and is 12 miles in circumference. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before, for even the gardens at Stowe comprised a mere 200 acres. The transformation took ten years to complete and decades more for the trees to grow to maturity. The entire gigantic project cost more than œ20,000, an enormous sum for the eighteenth century. It should be noted that Brown’s work rested on the wealth created by the Agricultural Revolution and by the gentry’s profits from investment or family connections in England’s commerce.

As Brown’s fame grew, English aristocrats outdid themselves to acquire his services. One tried to hire him to redesign his estate in Ireland, but Brown refused, noting in his humorous way that he “had not yet finished England.” Growing wealth enabled Brown in 1767 to buy his own estate, Fenstanton, in East Anglia. The manor carried certain old seignorial rights, so that Brown in a sense joined the aristocracy. His greatest honor came from George III, who appointed him the royal master gardener, with the right to live in Hampton Court, in the Wilderness House, which still stands. The post carried various horticultural responsibilities, including the raising of pineapples. The monarch and the landscaper got along very well together, so well that Brown was able on occasion to intercede in political questions for his friends, including William Pitt the Elder.

Brown used his success to foster his family fortunes. Helped by contacts, and one hopes not lacking in ability themselves, one son became an admiral in the British navy and the other served as a member of Parliament.

Brown, who had long suffered from asthma, collapsed and died in a London street at the age of sixty-seven. Upon hearing the news, Walpole wrote to a friend, “Your Dryads must go into black gloves, Madam. Their father-in-law, Lady Nature’s second husband, is dead! Mr. Brown dropped down at his own door yesterday.” An obituary concluded with the words, “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.”

Significance

Unlike Humphry Repton, his great successor in landscaping in the nineteenth century, Lancelot Brown left no extended statement of his principles. He did speak once of the need for a landscape to be fit not only for the owner but also for “the poet and painter.” There were to be no flowers to distract the eye, no collecting of large amounts of sculpture, but only lawns, woods, and water put together in a harmonious way in curved lines that seem so natural, but which are artificial. Brown was as much an artist as any eighteenth century composer or painter, except that he never got to see his creations in finished form.

His work was not universally esteemed. William Chambers, a contemporary critic, complained that his landscapes were so close to “vulgar nature” that they showed a poverty of imagination. Chambers, alluding to Brown’s low social origins, lamented that “peasants emerge from the melon-ground to take the periwig and turn professor,” and further that “this island is abandoned to kitchen gardeners well skilled in the culture of salads.” Brown made no known reply. Because of changing tastes, Brown’s reputation declined during Queen Victoria’s reign, to the extent that he came to be remembered mainly as a destroyer of formal gardens, and for his distinctive nickname. One modern and unsympathetic critic, N. F. Clark, comments that Brown’s “fault lay in endless repetition of a formula, the most obvious features of which were circular clumps of trees, the boundary ride or belt, serpentine rivers and his undulating lawns brought up to the very walls of the house.” One can also complain about Brown’s work worsening the social injustices so deeply embedded in England’s class structure, in that his vast parks most effectively cut off the gentry from any contact, even visual, with ordinary people.

Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, one must judge Brown’s work for oneself. In the eighteenth century, Brown had, as noted, countless admirers in his homeland. Foreign supporters included such disparate people as Catherine the Great of Russia and Thomas Jefferson of the United States. Both invoked his principles in their respective countries. The huge number of visitors to those Brown parks that are still intact in the early twenty-first century show a revival of interest in Brown and his work. A vigorous movement to maintain those parks that still exist has come into being. Those who love Brown’s parks will be thankful for such a movement when they realize that the trees, put out by the tens of thousands in the eighteenth century, have now passed their prime and will have to be replaced according to plans based on Brown’s principles. One hopes that the English will do their duty by their great landscaper, for the kind of beauty created by Brown is sorely needed in this industrial, urban age.

Bibliography

Chambers, Douglas. The Planters of the English Landscape Garden: Botany, Trees, and the Georgics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Chambers examines how new developments in horticulture as well as scientific advances and renewed interest in ancient texts, created a distinctive philosophy of gardening in England between 1650 and 1750. Good background for understanding Brown’s ideas and of other gardeners of the period.

Hinde, Thomas. Capability Brown: The Story of a Master Gardener. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. A good summary and beautifully illustrated.

Hyams, Edward. Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. An excellent book by an author who has written extensively on gardening.

Laird, Mark. The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720-1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Laird describes how the English mania for flowering shrubs and conifers from North America created a distinctively English type of garden. Includes information on Brown and his work. Illustrated.

Stroud, Dorothy. Capability Brown. London: County Life, 1950. Rev. ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Stroud’s book is the pioneering work on Brown and still the standard.

Turner, Roger. Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English Landscape. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. A lovely book, with many helpful old prints as well as modern photographs. Especially good for its descriptions of individual Brown parks.