| The amazing changes which have taken place in the appreciation
of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown as a
designer provide a second illustration of the effects which
different uses of 'nature' and 'landscape' have had on taste in
garden and landscape design. For most of his professional life
Brown was hailed as a near-genius and arbiter of taste. His work
was seen to be uniquely British and in the most 'natural' style
which could be conceived.
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section heading
Brown's status was fully recognised when he was appointed
Royal Gardener at Hampton Court in 1764. Three years later the
naturalness of his style was praised in an anonymous poem on The
Rise and Progress of the Present Taste in Planting Parks, Pleasure
Grounds, Gardens, Etc. The author gives fulsome praise to Brown
and emphasises the naturalness of his schemes:
He barren tracts with every charm illumes,
At his command a new Creation blooms;
Born to grace Nature, and her works complete,
With all that's beautiful, sublime and great!
For him each Muse enwreathes the Lawrel Crown,
And consecrates to Fame immortal Brown.
The conception of Nature which the poet had in mind was gentle
and pastoral. As David Hume had written
in 1748 'the eye is pleased with the prospect of corn-fields and
loaded vineyards, horses grazing, and flocks pasturing: but flies
the view of briars and brambles, affording shelter to wolves and
serpents'.
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| Brown designed both the house and the park at
Claremont in Surrey. His admirers regarded this, and other
architectural works, as adequate proof of his ability to handle
architectural details. |
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Further praise for Brown and his conception of nature came from
two important books in 1770. The first was Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern
Gardening, which Loudon later
called `the grand fundamental standard work on English gardening'.
It contains detailed descriptions of several of Brown's designs and
practical advice on how to achieve similar effects with ground,
woods, water, rocks and buildings. The second book, Horace Walpole's essay On the history of modern
taste in gardening was completed in 1770 but not published
until 1780. Since its appearance Walpole's essay has exerted an
enormous influence over garden historians. Walpole praises
Whately's book as `a system of rules pushed to a great degree of
refinement, and collected from the best examples and practice'.
After debating a few of the points raised by Whately, Walpole
concludes:
In the meantime how rich, how gay, how picturesque the face of
the country! The demolition of walls laying open each improvement,
every journey is made through a succession of pictures; and even
where taste is wanting in the spot improved, the general view is
embellished by variety. If no relapse to barbarism, formality and
seclusion is made, what landscapes will dignify every quarter of
our island, when the plantations that are making have attained
venerable maturity! A specimen of what our gardens will be may be
seen at Petworth, where the portion
of the park nearest the house has been allotted to the modern
style.
The park at Petworth had been designed by Brown in 1752 and was
often to be painted by J M W Turner
in the years to come. Walpole's praise for the design was a way of
praising the designer in spite of his resolve to exclude `living
artists' from his Essay. It is especially interesting that he
praises the `modern style' for its lack of `formality and
seclusion'. When the reaction against Brown set in the main charges
against him were his excessive formalism and lack of 'naturalness'.
Taste had moved on and the public had come to appreciate 'briars
and brambles' and even the wild scenery of the Lake Distsict. The
once-praised 'natural'style of Brown was left beached by the tide
of fashion. It now appeared 'artificial', 'stiff' and even
'formal'.
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to section heading
The first serious criticism of
Brown, in this vein, came from Sir William Chambers in his Dissertation on Oriental
Gardening, published in 1772. Chambers criticised 'gardens
which differ little from common fields' and praised the Chinese for
introducing some of the terrible aspects of nature into their
gardens:
Their scenes of terror are composed of gloomy woods, deep
vallies inacessible to the sun, impending barren rocks, dark
caverns, and impetuous cataracts rushing down the mountains from
all parts. The trees are ill formed, forced out of their natural
directions, and seemingly torn to pieces by the violence of
tempests.....
Chambers made other criticisms of Brown which soon caused his
book to be ridiculed by Mason and others, but the substantial
criticism contained in the above quotation had been foreshadowed by
Walpole and soon became widespread.
The public taste for savage scenery was encouraged by the
Reverend William Gilpin. He became
'the high priest of the picturesque', and after the publication of
his Picturesque Tours commenced in 1782 he did much to
popularise the type of scenery which Chambers liked in Chinese
gardens and which Gilpin found in the Wye Valley and the English
Lakes. Gilpin published an essay on Picturesque Beauty in
1792 and suggested that the smoothness of a garden was of no use in
making a picture and should be roughened with 'rugged oaks instead
of flowering shrubs' and by scattering stones and brushwood in the
foreground .
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Left, A Brownian scene from The
Landscape. Knight considered this type of scenery too dull,
vapid and smooth.
Right, a Gilpinesque scene from The Landscape. Knight
loved the broken banks and shaggy mounds |
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Gilpin's line of criticism was directed against Brown's gardens
with devestating effect by
Price, and Knight after 1793. The
first shot came from Knight in his
didactic poem The Landscape
See yon fantastic band,
With charts, pedometers, and rules in hand,
Advance triumphant, and alike lay waste
The forms of nature, and the works of taste!
T'improve, adorn, and polish, they profess;
But shave the goddess, whom they come to dress;
Level each broken bank and shaggy mound,
And fashion all to one unvaried round;
One even round, that ever gently flows,
Nor forms abrupt, nor broken colours knows;
But, wrapt all o'er in everlasting green, makes one dull,vapid,
smooth, and tranquil scene.......
Hence, hence! thou haggard fiend, however called,
Thin, meagre genius of the bare and bald;
Thy spade and mattock here at length lay down,
And follow to the tomb thy fav'rite brown:
Thy fav'rite brown, whose innovating hand
First dealt thy curses o'er this fertile land;
First taught the walk in formal spires to move,
And from their haunts the secret Dryads drove;
Brown's contemporaries would have been most puzzled to see their
favourite lampooned for destroying nature and making formal walks
and canals. But Knight 's criticisms
were supported by Uvedale Price, and
echoed by a host of critics for more than a century. Price was
particularly critical of Brown's handling of water. He wrote that
'Mr Brown grossly mistook his talent, for among all his tame
productions, his pieces of made water are perhaps the most so'. In
Price's judgement the serpentine curves of Brown's lakes, and the
lack of vegetation on their banks, made them look too like canals:
In Mr Brown's naked canals nothing detains the eye a moment, and
the two sharp extremeties appear to cut into each other. If a near
approach to mathematical exactness was a merit instead of a defect,
the sweeps of Mr Brown's water would be admirable.
Even Repton, who normally supported Brown, thought he had erred
in taming the River Derwent:
Where a rattling, turbulent mountain-stream passes through a
rocky valley, like the Derwent at Chatsworth, perhaps Mr Brown was wrong in
checking its noisy course, to produce the glassy surface of a slow
moving river.
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| A caricature of a Brownian
plan from J. C. Loudon's Country Residences, 1806. Loudon
described Brown's design philosophy as 'one uniform system of
smoothing, levelling and clumping of the most tiresome monotony
joined to the most disgusting formality' |
A wild and irregular design from J.
C. Loudon's Country Residences, 1806. His design embodies
the concept of nature which led to the unpopularity of Brown's
style. |
In the first phase of his professional career J C Loudon admired Gilpin, Price and Knight, and
surpassed them in advocating the creation of wild and irregular
gardens. He therefore included a vicious attack on Brown in his
1802 Observations on landscape gardening
What first brought him into reputation was a large sheet of
water which he made at Stowe, in
which, as in all his other works, he displayed the most wretched
and Chinese-like taste. Wherever his levelling hand has appeared,
adieu to every natural beauty! see every thing give way to one
uniform system of smoothing, levelling and clumping of the most
tiresome monotony, joined to the most disgusting formality.
The comments from W Gilpin's nephew, which have already been
noted, were echoed by many nineteenth century authors - who often
coupled abuse of his aesthetic taste with remarks on his humble
social origins and lack of education. Sir Walter Scott criticised both
Kent and Brown. He wrote that their imitations of
nature had 'no more resemblence to that nature which we desire to
see imitated, than the rouge of an antiquated coquette, bearing all
the marks of a sedulous toilette, bears to the artless blush of a
cottage girl'.
Criticism of Brown continued in the opening decades of the
twentieth century. T H Mawson
remarked in 1901 that `had Brown and his followers been content to
imitate nature, they would simply have perpetrated so many absurd
and expensive frauds, but this imitation did not meet the whole of
their misguided practice'. Even the wise and generous Gertrude
Jekyll had a special dislike for
Brown:
The long avenues, now just grown to maturity in many of
England's greatest parks, fell before Brown's relentless axe, for
straight lines were abhorrent to the new 'landscape' school.
Everything was to be 'natural' - sham natural generally, and
especially there was to be water everywhere......Possibly his
avowed dislike of stonework arose from his incapacity of designing
it; certainly when he did attempt anything architectural......his
ignorance and want of taste were clearly betrayed.
The Studio was highly critical of Brown in 1907:
As he knew practically nothing of his subject, and as, moreover,
he prided himself on knowing nothing, he adopted a set formula
which expressed his conception of nature, and to this formula he
almost always adhered......That such narrow conventionality should
ever have been accepted as in accordance with the spirit of nature
seems to us now almost incredible, and it is difficult to
understand how anyone of intelligence could have believed that this
sort of empty formality was worthy to be described as landscape
gardening.
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section heading
The revival in Brown's
popularity appears to date from the time when a foreign comentator,
Marie-Louise Gothein, recognised his
work as a distinct style rather than a bad attempt to imitate wild
nature. She observed in 1913 that 'Brown was the original advocate
of Hogarth's line of beauty'. The point was taken up by Christopher
Hussey seventeen years later in his
seminal book, The Picturesque. Hussey observed that Brown
attempted 'to create landscapes that should arouse emotions, by
means of the recipies for beauty
evolved by Hogarth and Burke'. He supported his observation with a
lovely quotation from Burke which appears to describe a Brown park:
Most people have observed the sort of sense they have had of
being swiftly drawn in an easy coach on a smooth turf, with gradual
ascents and declivities. This will give a better idea of the
Beautiful than almost anything else'.
In 1950, when writing an introduction to Dorothy Stroud's monograph on Brown, Hussey went
further and spoke of Brown as 'the most celebrated English
landscape architect of the eighteenth century' . The association of
Brown with Hogarth, Burke and Englishness proved irresistable to
later critics.
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Brown became a national hero. The
ultimate seal of approval, for the twentieth century, came from
Pevsner in an edition of his
Outline of European Archiecture which makes no reference to
Repton, Loudon or Lutyens:
The great name in the history of mid-eighteenth century
gardening is Lancelot Brown (Capability Brown, 1715-83). 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.
Hoskins also praised Brown and remarks that 'In 1764 he created
at Blenheim the most magnificent
private lake in the country by damming the little river Glyme :
"there is nothing finer in Europe," says Sacheverell Sitwell. He manipulated square miles of
landscape in the park, planting trees on a scale consonant with the
massive Vanburgh house'.
Nan Fairbrother even defends
his clumps: 'this was how Capability Brown established the superb
trees in his landscape parks, by planting a close group of saplings
and protective shrubs and thinning them as they grew'.
In recent years Brown has only been criticised by those writers
who continue to lament the loss of the old formal gardens which
were destroyed in order to make way for Brownian parks. It is more
a criticism of the garden owners than of the designer they
employed.
The astonishing change in the appreciation of Brown as a
landscape designer is a consequence of the development of garden
history as a serious subject. It became evident that he was a
stylist, and that the nature which he sought to imitate was not the
wild nature of briars, brambles and the Lake District. His love was
for that gentler nature which characterises the English lowlands;
for serpentine and smoothly flowing curves. Serpentine curves can
be conceived to occupy an intermediate position in the Neoplatonic
hierarchy. They are not as perfect as the circle and square but
they have more generality than the random patterns and jagged lines
which characterise wild forests and mountains.
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