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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Capability Brown

Author: Dorothy Stroud
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571134052
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Traces the life of the eighteenth century British landscape architect, discusses his most important designs, and explains his theories of landscaping

Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men

Author: David Brown
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236441
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Lancelot 'Capability' Brown is often thought of as an innovative genius who single-handedly pioneered a new, 'naturalistic' style of landscape design. But he was only one of many landscape designers in Georgian England, albeit the most commercially successful. Published to tie in with the tercentenary of Brown's birth, Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men casts important new light on his world-renowned work, his eventful life and the business of landscape design in Georgian England. There is no evidence that Brown actually invented the style with which his name is now so closely associated - it was simply the style of the times. He was the head of a complex business that could supply clients with a whole design 'package', which included new greenhouses, kitchen gardens and land drainage schemes. This innovative book investigates the nature and organization of Brown's business, and draws insightful comparisons with similar providers of 'taste' such as the Adam brothers, Thomas Chippendale and Josiah Wedgwood. Illustrated with over 120 images, this beautiful book shows that Brown's style, like the organization of his business, was the product of a distinctly modern world.

Capability Brown and the Northern Landscape

Author: Lancelot Brown
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780905974125
Category : Gardens, English
Languages : en
Pages : 48

Book Description

Capability Brown and Humphry Repton

Author: Edward Hyams
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Inspired by French and Italian landscape painting, a number of eighteenth-century artist-gardeners led by William Kent created an art-form unique in the West, althought favoured from times of antiquity in China and Japan: the picturesque garden - virtually a landscape picture made not of paint on canvas but of real country and buildings. Towering above the rest of the professional practitioners of this art, in terms both of genius and industry, were two remarkable men, Capability Brown and his successor Humphry Repton. Both transformed many thousands of acres of England and Wales from 'natural' into 'picturesque' landscape; both , in the course of their work, met many of the leading men of their day, and George III made a friend of Brown; both, in their different ways, exerted a lasting influence on other landscape designers, including those of America and Europe. -- Book jacket.

Humphry Repton

Author: Tom Williamson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789142997
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Humphry Repton (1752–1818) remains one of England’s most interesting and prolific garden and landscape designers. Renowned for his innovative design proposals and distinctive before-and-after images, captured in his famous “Red Books,” Repton’s astonishing career represents the link between the simple parklands of his predecessor Capability Brown and the more elaborate, structured, and formal landscapes of the Victorian age. This lavishly illustrated book, based on a wealth of new research, reinterprets Repton’s life, working methods, and designs, and examines why they proved so popular in a rapidly changing world.