Capability Brown and the English Landscape Garden

Author: Laura Mayer
Publisher: Shire Publications
ISBN: 9780747810490
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The name Lancelot 'Capability' Brown has become synonymous with the eighteenth-century English landscape garden: between 1751 and 1783 his consultancy handled over 170 major commissions. Ruthlessly efficient, he could stake out the 'capabilities' of a particular terrain within an hour on horseback. Rising to the position of Master Gardener to George III, his trademark features included bald lawns, clumped trees, undulating lakes and enclosing belts of woodland on the estate's perimeter. With this standard park formula Brown and his followers held the commercial monopoly on garden design well into the following century, resisting the more rugged topography advocated by Richard Payne Knight's new generation of Romantics.

Capability Brown

Author: Sarah Rutherford
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 1909881546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
One of the most remarkable men of the 18th century, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was known to many as ‘The Omnipotent Magician’ who could transform unpromising countryside into beautiful parks that seemed to be only the work of nature. His list of clients included half the House of Lords, six Prime Ministers and even royalty. Although his fame has dimmed, we still enjoy many of his works today at National Trust properties such as Croome Park, Petworth, Berrington, Stowe, Wimpole, Blenheim Palace, Highclere Castle (location of the ITV series Downton Abbey) and many more.In Capability Brown, author and garden historian Sarah Rutherford tells his triumphant story, uncovers his aims and reveals why he was so successful. Illustrated throughout with colour photographs of contemporary sites, historical paintings and garden plans, this is an accessible book for anyone who wants to know more about the man who changed the face of the nation and created a landscape style which for many of us defines the English countryside.

Humphry Repton

Author: John Phibbs
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847863549
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
A definitive survey of the glorious British landscapes designed by Humphry Repton, whose influence is felt everywhere from the rolling meadows and kitchen gardens of English estates to New York City’s Central Park. Widely acknowledged as the last great landscape designer of the eighteenth century, Humphry Repton created work that survives as a bridge between the picturesque theory of Capability Brown and the pastoral philosophy of Frederick Law Olmsted. By turns inspired by and in opposition to the grandeur of Brown’s estates, Repton’s contribution to the British landscape encompassed a tremendous range, from subtle adjustments that emphasized the natural features of the countryside to deliberate interventions that challenged the notion of the picturesque. This remarkable book explores 15 of Repton’s most celebrated landscapes—from the early maturity of his gardens at Courteenhall and Mulgrave Castle to more adventurous landscapes at Stanage, Brightling, and Endsleigh that would point the way toward how we envision parkland today. With photography by Joe Cornish commissioned specially for the book, and including reproductions of key illustrations and plans for garden design from the famous red books that shed light on Repton’s vision and process, this book illuminates some of Britain’s most beautiful gardens and parks—and the masterful mind behind their creation.

Place-making

Author: John Phibbs
Publisher: English Heritage
ISBN: 1848023669
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) is the iconic figure at the head of the English landscape style, a tradition that has dominated landscape design in the western world. He was widely acclaimed for his genius in his own day and his influence on the culture of England has arguably been as great as that of Turner, Telford and Wordsworth. Yet, although Brown has had his biographers, his work has generated very little analysis. Brown was prolific; he has had a direct influence on half a million acres of England and Wales. The astonishing scale of his work means that he did not just transform the English countryside, but also our idea of what it is to be English and what England is. His work is everywhere, but goes largely unnoticed. His was such a naturalistic style that all his best work was mistaken for untouched nature. This has made it very difficult to see and understand. Visitors to Brown landscapes do not question the existence of the parkland he created and there has been little professional or academic analysis of his work. This book for the first time looks at the motivation behind Brown’s landscapes and questions their value and structure whilst at the same time placing him within the English landscape tradition. It aims primarily to make landscape legible, to show people where to stand, what to look at and how to see.

Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English Landscape

Author: Roger Turner
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Turner, landscape architect and writer, begins with a good introduction of 18th-century England and its gardens. He follows with a biographical account of Lancelot "Capability'' Brown and his many contributions to landscape design, including the creation of numerous parks for the English nobility. In particular, 15 of Brown's landscapes (e.g., Blenheim) are covered in detail, with illustrations ranging from original plans to photographs of the maturation of the gardens. Turner describes the grooming of nature, the plants used, and the practical and technical aspects of the work that created the natural landscapes that have made Brown immortal. A handsome and well-written book, highly recommended for subject collections. Daniel S. Kalk, Enfield Central Lib., Ct. -Library Journal.

Gardens of Court and Country

Author: David Jacques
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300222017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
Gardens of Court and Country provides the first comprehensive overview of the development of the English formal garden from 1630 to 1730. Often overshadowed by the English landscape garden that became fashionable later in the 18th century, English formal gardens of the 17th century displayed important design innovations that reflected a broad rethinking of how gardens functioned within society. With insights into how the Protestant nobility planned and used their formal gardens, the domestication of the lawn, and the transformation of gardens into large rustic parks, David Jacques explores the ways forecourts, flower gardens, bowling greens, cascades, and more were created and reimagined over time. This handsome volume includes 300 illustrations - including plans, engravings, and paintings - that bring lost and forgotten gardens back to life.

The Genius of the Place

Author: John Dixon Hunt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262580922
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
A garden classic, The Genius of the Place reveals that the history of landscape gardening is much more than a history of design and style; it opens up a wide perspective of English cultural history, showing how landscape gardening was gradually transformed over two centuries into an art that has been widely imitated throughout Europe and North America. The English landscape garden is richly documented in this anthology. Over 100 illustrations accompany writings that range from Francis Bacon to Jane Austin; from the early 1600s, when Englishmen began to determine their own concept and form of the garden, through the first half of the eighteenth century when its distinctive feature emerged, to the heyday of the landscape garden under "Capability" Brown and the reactions to his pure formalism under Repton and Loudon in the 1800s. This edition contains a new introduction and bibliography covering the many developments in garden history during the last dozen years.

Polite Landscapes

Author: Tom Williamson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Parks and gardens in eighteenth-century England are usually seen as works of art created by individual geniuses like William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. But this narrow view wasn't necessarily shared by contemporaries, and Tom Williamson in this thought-provoking book reveals that the aristocracy and gentry, who paid for these private landscapes and lived in them, were motivated by more complex interests and needs. Landowners had strong ideas of their own about how their property should look and how it should function. The park and garden were part of a working estate consisting of farms and forestry enterprises, and the surroundings of the country house were shaped to suit the requirements of hunting, shooting, riding and other recreational activities as well as to conform to the aesthetic principles of philosophers and landscape gardeners. Tom Williamson's pioneering study concentrates on the wider social, economic and political implications of these elaborate private landscapes. He emphasizes the practical relationship between the landowners who were demanding customers and the designers who were businessmen as well as artists. In the process he shows how changing fashions in the layout of gentlemen's pleasure grounds were related to broader currents of social and economic development in eighteenth-century England.

Garden and Grove

Author: John Dixon Hunt
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812292782
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Garden and Grove is a pioneering study of the English fascination with Italian Renaissance gardens. John Dixon Hunt studies reactions of English visitors in their journals and travel books to the exciting world of Italian gardens: its links with classical villas, with Virgil and farming, with Ovid and metamorphosis, its association with theater, its variety, its staged debates between art and nature. Then he looks at what English visitors made of these Italian garden experiences upon their return home and at how they created Italianate gardens on their estates, on their stages, and in their poems. With a wealth of literary and visual materials previously untapped, Hunt provides a new history of an intriguing and vital phase of English garden history. Not only does he suggest the centrality of the garden as a focus for many social, aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideas but he argues that the so-called English landscape garden before "Capability" Brown, in the late eighteenth century, owed much to a long and continuing emulation of Italian Renaissance models.

The English Landscape Garden

Author: Michael Symes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848023772
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The eighteenth-century phenomenon of the English landscape garden was so widespread that even today, when so much has been built over or otherwise changed, examples remain throughout England. Although seemingly natural, the English landscape was generally the result of considerable effort, contrivance, and design skill, the glorious outcome of "the art that conceals art." Taking many forms, the landscape garden might involve digging lakes, raising or leveling hills, or planting vast numbers of trees--whatever was required to show nature to best advantage. Richly illustrated throughout, this book uncovers the complex, multi-layered, and wide-ranging story of the landscape garden in England.