This year, somewhat overshadowed by the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, marks the tercentenary of the birth of the landscape designer Lancelot Brown, whose supposedly naturalistic confections around more than 130 country houses earned him the popular tag of “Capability”. The conjunction with Shakespeare has pleased Brown’s supporters, who believe he should be similarly regarded as one of the “curators of English identity”. “He stands behind our vision, and fantasy,” one biographer’s blurb reads, “of rural England.” Fantasy for sure. It’s hard to see what connection the classic Brownian prospect – artificial lake, vast lawns, mansion framed by trees – has to do with the real rural England.
But hyperbolic praise for the great earth-mover is nothing new. In 2011 the Financial Times carried a series of articles that suggested Brown should be “canonised”. The historian Norman Scarfe wrote: “England’s most original contribution to the whole history of art lies in the landscape, and was an affair of creating harmonious pictures with the land itself.” Back in the 18th century Horace Walpole suggested: “Such . . . was the effect of his genius that when he was the happiest man, he will be least remembered; so closely did he copy nature that his works will be mistaken.”
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