Capability Brown

Description

To celebrate its 300th anniversary, a definitive survey of the most famous Capability Brown gardens and landscapes in Britain. Widely recognized as the most influential landscape designer of his day, Lancelot “Capability” Brown was to England what Frederick Law Olmsted was to the United States, responsible for shaping the ideal of the nation’s park. Brown’s ambition was to bring out the best of his potential from a landscape rather than to impose his own ideas on it. His designs are organic, weaving gestures of color and perspective in the characteristics that the country already offered. His designs are so natural and so perfectly complement the houses within them that, for many, the Capability Brown landscape is the epitome of English heritage. Its gardens and parks, as well as the houses themselves, would become icons of life in the British countryside. Published to coincide with the 300th anniversary of his birth, this remarkable book illuminates fifteen of Brown’s most famous landscapes. To love the great English estates is to love the settings with which Brown surrounded them, from idyllic parks in Milton and Broadlands to landscapes structured around iconic houses in Blenheim, Burghley, Wakefield and Chatsworth. With photography commissioned for the book, and including rarely seen archival drawings that shed light on Brown’s process, this book serves as a guide to Britain’s most beloved landscapes and an exploration of the masterful mind behind its creation.