Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men

Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men PDF Author: David Brown
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236921
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Lancelot “Capability” Brown is often thought of as the innovative genius who single-handedly pioneered a new, naturalistic style of landscape design, but he was in fact only one of many landscape designers in Georgian England. Published to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Brown’s birth, this book casts important new light on his world-renowned work, his eventful life, and the wider and robust world of landscape design in Georgian England. David Brown and Tom Williamson argue that Brown was one of the most successful designers of his time working in a style that was otherwise widespread—and that it was his skill with this style, and not his having invented it, that linked his name to it. The authors look closely at Brown’s design business and the products he offered clients, showing that his design packages helped define the era’s aesthetic. They compare Brown’s business to those of similar designers such as the Adam brothers, Thomas Chippendale, and Josiah Wedgwood, and they contextualize Brown’s work within the wider contexts of domestic planning and the rise of neoclassicism. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book celebrates the work of a master designer who was both a product and harbinger of the modern world.

Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men

Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men PDF Author: David Brown
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236921
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Lancelot “Capability” Brown is often thought of as the innovative genius who single-handedly pioneered a new, naturalistic style of landscape design, but he was in fact only one of many landscape designers in Georgian England. Published to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Brown’s birth, this book casts important new light on his world-renowned work, his eventful life, and the wider and robust world of landscape design in Georgian England. David Brown and Tom Williamson argue that Brown was one of the most successful designers of his time working in a style that was otherwise widespread—and that it was his skill with this style, and not his having invented it, that linked his name to it. The authors look closely at Brown’s design business and the products he offered clients, showing that his design packages helped define the era’s aesthetic. They compare Brown’s business to those of similar designers such as the Adam brothers, Thomas Chippendale, and Josiah Wedgwood, and they contextualize Brown’s work within the wider contexts of domestic planning and the rise of neoclassicism. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book celebrates the work of a master designer who was both a product and harbinger of the modern world.

Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men

Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men PDF Author: David Brown
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236441
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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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, Royal Gardener

Capability Brown, Royal Gardener PDF Author: Jonathan Finch
Publisher: White Rose University Press
ISBN: 1912482258
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Lancelot “Capability” Brown was one of the most influential landscape designers of the eighteenth-century at a time when Britain was changing radically from an agrarian to an industrial and colonial nation, whilst Europe was periodically convulsed by war and revolution. The extent and nature of his influence are, however, fiercely debated. Brown worked at hundreds of important sites across England and his name became synonymous with the “English Garden” style which was copied across Northern Europe and entranced Catherine the Great, who remodelled her landscapes in St Petersburg to reflect the new style. He was fêted in his time, and recognised by the Crown, but Brown’s style was readily copied over his later life and particularly after his death. Arguably, this ubiquity led to the denigration of his achievements and even his character, particularly by the agents of the Picturesque. The lack of any personal primary material from Brown - forcing scholars to rely on his landscapes, contracts and bank accounts - has hindered attempts to provide a rounded and credible account of the man and his works. However, by exploring his team of associates and his role as Royal Gardener, new light can be thrown on the man, his landscapes and his landscape legacy. Bringing together a number of perspectives from across Northern Europe, Capability Brown, Royal Gardener explores the lasting international impact of Brown. With Brown’s position as Royal Gardener at its heart, this book explores for the first time his business methods, working methods and European influence. It assesses how, crucially, Brown’s work practices placed him within the world of nurserymen and landscape designers, and how his business practices and long term relationships with draughtsmen and designers allowed him to manage a huge number of projects and a substantial financial turnover. This, in turn, allowed him to work in a way that promoted and advanced his style of landscape. Edited by Professor Jonathan Finch (University of York) and Dr Jan Woudstra (University of Sheffield), and with a varied range of engaging contributors drawn internationally from archaeology, art history, history and landscape architecture, Capability Brown, Royal Gardener weaves together strands from across a broad range of disciplinary interests. It makes an important contribution to the scholarly discussion of Brown’s work, the work of his collaborators, and legacy in the UK and across Northern Europe. Relevant to students and academics at all levels, this volume throws new light on Capability Brown and his impact on the business of place-making in Northern Europe.

England's Magnificent Gardens

England's Magnificent Gardens PDF Author: Roderick Floud
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1101871032
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
An altogether different kind of book on English gardens—the first of its kind—a look at the history of England’s magnificent gardens as a history of Britain itself, from the seventeenth-century gardens of Charles II to those of Prince Charles today. In this rich, revelatory history, Sir Roderick Floud, one of Britain’s preeminent economic historians, writes that gardens have been created in Britain since Roman times but that their true growth began in the seventeenth century; by the eighteenth century, nurseries in London took up 100 acres, with ten million plants (!) that were worth more than all of the nurseries in France combined. Floud’s book takes us through more than three centuries of English history as he writes of the kings, queens, and princes whose garden obsessions changed the landscape of England itself, from Stuart, Georgian, and Victorian England to today’s Windsors. Here are William and Mary, who brought Dutch gardens and bulbs to Britain; William, who twice had his entire garden lowered in order to see the river from his apartments; and his successor, Queen Anne, who, like many others since, vowed to spend little on her gardens and instead spent millions. Floud also writes of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the founder of Kew Gardens, who spent more than $40,000 on a single twenty-five-foot tulip tree for Carlton House; Queen Victoria, who built the largest, most advanced and most efficient kitchen garden in Britain; and Prince Charles, who created and designed the gardens of Highgrove, inspired by his boyhood memories of his grandmother’s gardens. We see Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who created a magnificent garden at Blenheim Palace, only to tear it apart and build a greater one; Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, the savior of Chatsworth’s 100-acre garden in the midst of its 35,000 acres; and the gardens of lesser mortals, among them Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West, both notable garden designers and writers. We see the designers of royal estates—among them, Henry Wise, William Kent, Humphrey Repton, and the greatest of all English gardeners, “Capability” Brown, who created the 150-acre lake of Blenheim Palace, earned millions annually, and designed more than 170 parks, many still in existence today. We learn how gardening became a major catalyst for innovation (central heating came from experiments to heat greenhouses with hot-water pipes); how the new iron industry of industrializing Britain supplied a myriad of tools (mowers, pumps, and the boilers that heated the greenhouses); and, finally, Floud explores how gardening became an enormous industry as well as an art form in Britain, and by the nineteenth century was unrivaled anywhere in the world.

What did Capability Brown do for Ecology? The legacy for biodiversity, landscapes, and nature conservation

What did Capability Brown do for Ecology? The legacy for biodiversity, landscapes, and nature conservation PDF Author: Christine Handley (eds)
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1904098657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book is based on a major conference with Historic England, Natural England, the Ancient Tree Forum and others which took place in 2016 as part of the celebrations for the tercentenary of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. The event brought together ecologists, landscape historians and archaeologists, land managers and conservationists to look critically at the impact of Brown and his successors on the UK's landscape. The book addresses the paradigms of these designed landscapes. It considers the issues around the legacy of Brown's creations and ideas and the repercussions that are still apparent today. It makes for a thought-provoking and rich discussion covering habitat conservation and creation, drainage and the release of alien species. This is the untold story of the ecology of Capability Brown and the landscape school which followed.

Place-making

Place-making PDF Author: John Phibbs
Publisher: English Heritage
ISBN: 1848023669
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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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.

Romantic Capabilities

Romantic Capabilities PDF Author: Mike Goode
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192606905
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Romantic Capabilities discusses the relationship between popular new media uses of literary texts. Devising and modelling an original critical methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, this volume contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals medial capabilities of the text that can transform how we understand its significance for the original historical context for which it was created. Following an introductory theoretical chapter that explains the book's unconventional approach to the archive, Romantic Capabilities analyzes significant popular "media behaviors" exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake's pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and 3D photographers to Walter Scott's historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen's novels and their imaginary country estates. The result is a book that reveals Blake to be an important early theorist of viral media and the law, Scott's novels to be studies in vision that helped give rise to modern immersive media, and Austenian realism to be a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends. It offers insight into the politics of virality, the dependence of immersion on a sense of frame, and the extent to which eighteenth-century landscape gardening anticipated Deleuzian ideas of the "virtual" by granting existence to reality's as-yet-unrealized capabilities.

Humphry Repton

Humphry Repton PDF Author: Tom Williamson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789143004
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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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.

Landscape and Infrastructure

Landscape and Infrastructure PDF Author: Margaret Birney Vickery
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350071102
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Landscape and Infrastructure examines the relationships between landscape painting and landscape design from the seventeenth century to the present, and contemporary infrastructure projects around the globe. These seemingly disparate subjects are united by a shared concern for the pastoral middle ground; a traditionally productive landscape. By focusing an art-historical lens on pre-industrial productive systems and the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the pastoral landscape tradition, we can gain a better understanding of how to weave new approaches to productive infrastructure systems (such as power generation, water filtration and food production) into our contemporary landscapes. With rising demand for clean energy, clean water, and locally-grown food, this study offers a historical perspective on how such systems can be integrated into our suburban and urban areas. Vestigial elements of the pastoral tradition have long held aesthetic sway in our suburbs, cities and national parks, both in Britain and America. Now, as new energy and water related projects encroach on these spaces, remnants of the pastoral play a crucial role in convincing neighborhood residents, municipal leaders, and energy companies or water authorities of the benefits of a neighboring infrastructure. This book investigates the history of that tradition and highlights the advantages it brings as we re-imagine infrastructure in the twenty-first century.

Green Retreats

Green Retreats PDF Author: Stephen Bending
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107040027
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This lively and beautifully illustrated account follows some remarkable eighteenth-century women in their gardens.