Property News · July 23, 2016

Gardens: how Capability Brown transformed this green and pleasant land


The 300th anniversary of ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth is the ideal time to hail the design and horticultural genius who reshaped far more than the contours of our national landscape Three hundred years after his birth, Lancelot “Capability” Brown has so comprehensively infiltrated our national consciousness that our notion of what is beautiful in the English landscape is almost entirely of his making. At the end of the 17th century, the dominant taste was for rigidly formal gardens inspired by Versailles: an imperious style that proclaimed man’s confident dominance over nature. Brown established in its place a definitively English style that deliberately blurred the boundaries between art and nature. This was understood as both an aesthetic and political rebuff to French tyranny and autocracy.Brown did not invent the landscape garden: it was William Kent (1685-1748) before him who famously “leapt the fence and saw that all nature was a garden”. But Brown’s landscapes confidently expressed an emergent new relationship with nature: it was no longer a predatory force to be excluded, but, increasingly, a source of joy and inspiration. Kent’s painterly gardens (especially Stowe) remained self-conscious artefacts, packed with temples, arches and statuary that alluded to a body of classical knowledge shared by all educated men of the time. But perhaps because Brown was of humble birth (he was the son of Northumbrian farmers) and had never received a classical education or made the Grand Tour, his landscapes spoke to the emotions rather than the intellect. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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