BROWN, Lancelot (Capability)

(b. 1716 Kirkharle, d. 1783 London)

English landscape architect. Beginning work as a gardener’s boy in Northumberland, in 1742 Brown obtained a post at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, one of the most talked of gardens of the day. His duties included showing the grounds to visitors, thus giving him a chance to make himself known to the nobility who were to be his clients. For some years he worked at Stowe under the broad direction of the landscape architect William Kent. After Kent’s death, he set up as a garden designer and by 1753 was the leading “improver of grounds” in England.

His first achievement was a lake at Wakefield Lodge for the Duke of Grafton; it was so successful that he was summoned to alter the park of the famous Blenheim Palace at Woodstock. There he created the masterly lakes beside the architect John Vanbrugh’s bridge and almost totally erased the earlier geometric plantations. His practice led him into architecture in order to ensure the unity of his designs, and he became a competent architect in the classical mode of the day.

The means that Brown used were natural: he employed neither carved stone nor architectural shapes but limited himself to turf; mirrors of still water; a few species of trees used singly, in clumps, or in loose belts; and the undulations of the ground. With these he made simple harmonious patterns without obvious symmetry. These elements are well illustrated in the park and lake at Petworth House in West Sussex, which Brown landscaped over the years from about 1751 to 1757.

Brown’s style is often thought of as the antithesis of the style of André Le Nôtre, designer of the splendid formal gardens of Versailles, because Brown made use of the nature of the ground whereas Le Nôtre imposed an architectural pattern on nature. Nevertheless, they had in common an eye for proportion and a noble sense of scale, and both linked their creations with the outside world. Brown’s designs were adapted to the society he served, which was totally unlike the authoritarian regime of the 17th-century monarchies. English gentlemen did not maintain courts; they lived privately on their country estates and liked to see their domains from their windows and to ride about them.

Brown’s nickname arose from his habit of saying that a place had “capabilities.” By the time he died, he was rich and honoured and had “improved” a greater acreage of ground than any landscape architect had done before.

Aerial view

The relationship of the building to the landscape was a crucial part of the design of Blenheim Palace. John Vanbrugh and Henry Wise created formal gardens and turned the surrounding forest into parkland to provide a more appropriate frame for the house; Vanbrugh also sought (unsuccessfully) to retain the nearby medieval ruins of Woodstock Manor. His triple-spanned Grand Bridge in front of the palace originally crossed three canals but now spans the lake created by Capability Brown when he redesigned the landscaping.

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Oxford Bridge

In 1742, Brown obtained a job at Stowe as a member of Lord Cobham’s gardening staff, he worked under William Kent, one of the founders of the new English style of landscape gardening. Stowe did him well and he was Master Gardener by the age of 26, remaining there until 1750.

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View of the Garden

Prior Park is a Palladian house, designed by John Wood, the Elder, and built in the 1730s and 1740s for Ralph Allen on a hill overlooking Bath.

Its landscape garden was laid out by the poet Alexander Pope between the construction of the house and 1764. During 1737, at least 55,200 trees, mostly elm and Scots pine, were planted, along the sides and top of the valley. No trees were planted on the valley floor. Water was channeled into fish ponds at the bottom of the valley.

Later work, during the 1750s and 1760s, was undertaken by the landscape gardener Capability Brown. This included extending the gardens to the north and removing the central cascade making the combe into a single sweep. The features in the gardens include, among others, a Palladian bridge (one of only 4 left in the world, Gothic temple, and a serpentine lake. The Palladian bridge, which is a copy of the one at Wilton House, was built by Richard Jones.

Prior Park is typical of Capability Brown’s landscaping. The garden, as it was originally laid out, influenced other designers and contributed to defining the style of garden thought of as the English garden in continental Europe.

The photo shows the Palladian Bridge.

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