Lancelot (Capability) Brown (1716-1783) is one of the most influential English landscape gardeners. He acquired his nickname, writes Anne Barton, from a habit of assuring prospective patrons of the great capabilities of their grounds. The most celebrated of those eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landscape gardeners who attempted to smooth out and compose nature until it resembled an idealized painting of Arcadia or the Elysian Fields by Poussin or Claude Lorrain, he once encountered a gentleman who expressed an earnest desire to predecease Brown, because I want to see Heaven before you have improved it.

Brown influenced Humphry Repton (1752-1818), who presented his clients with red-leather-bound books of watercolors, showing?through cutout projections?what their large estates would look like before and after Repton improved their grounds and gardens.

Capability Brown transformed the formal, geometric gardens of the Renaissance estates, digging and planting and reworking the landscape to manufacture a natural, Romantic vista. Later practitioners, especially those who promulgated the Gothic aesthetic, criticized Browns work, saying Browns estates were steeped in a residue of formality and organization and were not sufficiently wild or natural.

Here, for instance, is an engraving from Payne Knights The Landscape (1794), showing a house and park in the style of Capability Brown. Knight thinks the design too placid and unadventurous and, hence, unnatural. The second engraving shows the same house and grounds transformed under the picturesque ideal, emphasizing in nature and the architecture qualities of roughness, variety and intimacy.

(Illustrations from David Watkins The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design, 1982).

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