Humphry Repton

By Laura Mayer

Humphry Repton (1752–1818) ambitiously styled himself Capability Brown's successor: the century's next great improver of landed property. With his rare combinations of skills – he was a talented topographical sketcher with an excellent knowledge of farming – over thirty years Repton amassed an incredible four hundred commissions, ingratiating himself with the aristocracy and raising the status of his adopted profession. His famous Red Books, illustrated to help clients visualize the potential of their estates, also did their part to encourage the appreciation of landscape aesthetics. With colourful illustrations and detailed site investigations, this book traces Repton's landscape designs from Picturesque wildernesses like Blaise Castle to the progressive Gardenesque style of Wanstead House in Greater London. It is both a perfect visitor's guide to the gardens and an introduction to the theory of Repton's work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9780747815280

Laura Mayer

LAURA MAYER, founder of Soul Dancing Healing Practice, bridges her clinical expertise with her spiritual knowing. She is a spiritual transformational counselor, licensed occupational therapist, motivational speaker, and intuitive healer. She is a facilitator of Soul Memory Discovery and Spiritual Indigo Healing. Mayer’s gift and greatest joy is in opening people’s hearts and empowering others to be fully seen, fully heard, and fully present. Mayer’s work spans three decades as a licensed occupational therapist in the field of psychiatry and pediatrics. As a master healer, Mayer’s capacity to go deep within the soul will assist you in igniting your light to be the best you can be, while tapping into the source of pain dormant in your core. Mayer currently resides in Tenafly, New Jersey.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: BROWN’S LEGACY

ON 6 February 1783, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown called upon his old friend and patron Lord Coventry in Piccadilly. Returning home he had a fit, fell to the ground and died almost immediately. He was sixty-seven years old. ‘Your dryads must go into black gloves’, Horace Walpole announced dramatically to Lady Ossory. ‘Their father-in-law, Lady Nature’s second husband, is dead!’ Certainly, Brown’s life had been one exhaustive journey, travelling the length and breadth of the country in a bid to reduce the English countryside to a simple pastoral idyll, one landscaping scheme at a time. A ruthlessly ambitious businessman, Brown rose from apprentice under-gardener at a modest Northumbrian estate to the lofty position of Master Gardener to George III. At his death, 170 great estates had been shaped for leisure, profit and sport by his personal design, while over 4, 000 landscape parks had been created by a new generation of natural landscapists inspired by him.

As late as 1800, an anonymous pamphleteer, describing Brown’s work at Fisherwick Hall in Staffordshire, observed that ‘his genius has afforded such proofs of true taste in nature’s beauties, as seemed unknown before his time’. Landscape minimalism had triumphed, but the century’s relationship with nature was about to change. For, despite the aesthetic elegance and economic viability of a Brownian park, his repetitive formula began to grate with the average garden visitor, who missed the stylistic diversity supplied by the Arcadian layouts of the mid eighteenth century.

The garden tourist Mrs Lybbe Powys lamented that, because of Brown, ‘every fine place throughout England is comparatively alike’, as ‘the rage for laying out grounds makes every nobleman and gentleman a copier of their neighbour’.

With the dawning of a new Romantic sensibility a band of Picturesque theorists emerged from the shadows, headed by Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824) and Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829). These men despised Brown’s parks as being artificial, lifeless and bland, and were not afraid to say so. ‘I very earnestly wish that I might die before you,’ snapped Richard Owen Cambridge to Brown, ‘because I should like to see heaven before you can improve it.’

This 1786 watercolour of Fisherwick by James Spyers records Brown’s Palladian house and graceful parkland, designed and built for Arthur Chichester. The garden marquees housed the ‘elegant entertainments’ responsible for Chichester’s bankruptcy.

In the midst of this bitter stylistic warfare, one man, Humphry Repton, set himself up as Brown’s champion and self-styled successor. It was a bold move, and one that would, unwittingly, open him up to sustained persecution from the Picturesque crusaders.

Sir Uvedale Price, one of the leading proponents of the Picturesque aesthetic.

This book charts Repton’s career as a landscape gardener as he struggled to reconcile his own personal ambitions and theoretic principles within the fluctuating tastes of the turn of the nineteenth century. It examines his extensive writings about the theory and practice of landscape gardening, and considers how both his style and social identity fluctuated and evolved. For, although Repton began by replicating almost exactly the manicured parkscapes of his idol, he was soon under pressure to produce the more wild and rugged ‘savage Picturesque’ landscapes advocated by Payne Knight and Price. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Repton had been forced to abandon Brown’s aesthetic altogether, as the fashion for landscape shifted from rough-hewn Picturesque wildernesses to modest, suburban gardens with fussy flowerbeds and formal features. Here at last Repton came into his own, achieving with his Gardenesque style an uneasy compromise between Brown’s bare lawns and the variety of the Picturesque.

REINVENTING REPTON

HUMPHRY REPTON (1752–1818) was thirty-six years old with a raft of failed ventures behind him when he recreated himself as a ‘landscape gardener’ (a term he personally coined) in a bid to support his family. It would be a rocky journey from minor Norfolk squire to Capability Brown’s eventual successor. Yet, once established, thanks largely to his competence as a watercolourist, Repton prevailed as the country’s leading landscape gardener for thirty years. Although his ideas were frequently