The Style of the Most Influential Designers of the 18th Century English Landscape Movement: William Kent, Lancelot "Capability" Brown, and Charles Bridgeman

Julián Huertas

27 March 2015

Professor Musgrave

Garden Art in European History

Blog Post Six:

For the three most influential designers and innovators of in the18th century English Landscape Movement - Charles Bridgeman, William Kent & ‘Capability’ Brown - write a brief paragraph to describe the style - form, layout, content, purpose - of their landscapes.

 

            William Kent (1685-1748), Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1717-1783), and Charles Bridgeman (1690-1738) are the most famous designers of the 18^th century English Landscape Movement.  In this blog post, I will analyze the style – the form, layout, content, and purpose – of each respective English designers landscapes.

            William Kent was a proponent of the picturesque landscape. His most famous projects include Chiswick House in Chiswick, Rousham House in Oxfordshire, and Stowe House in Buckinghamshire. He combined art and nature to create classically inspired landscapes. His design is noted for closely representing the landscape paintings like those of French painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. He appealed to emotions and moods with his landscapes and idealized nature. He utilized soft lines and edges, classical temples, and “borrowed views,” in which he drew the eye into the landscape and natural landscape beyond. Although brilliant, Kent was known for being both unreliable and impractical.  He could create terrific 2D representations in plan but was not knowledgeable about how to turn these into actual designs. His purpose for designing was for profit and to create an idealized landscape. Kent’s style and inability to be practical contrast to both Brown and Bridgeman.

            Lancelot “Capability” Brown is potentially England’s most famous landscape designer. He designed numerous gardens and landscapes across the UK, but his most famous projects are Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire and the Hampton Court gardens in Surrey. He began his career designing gardens for big estates but transitioned later in his career to designing massive landscapes. Rather than appealing to the classicism of earlier designers and landscapes, he used the nature of England as an inspiration. The function of his landscapes was for pleasure but also for profit. At both Stowe House and Blenheim Palace he sculpted and designed the landscapes to have large open spaces, trees, lakes, and water channels. The greatest irony of Brown’s designing career was that he was brilliantly subtle with his designs. It is for this reason that Sir Horace Walpole is noted for saying that Brown’s work will be forgotten because he copied nature so well that it does not look like the hand of man influenced the design.  Unlike Kent, Brown was practical and successfully implemented his designs on a massive scale.  

            Charles Bridgeman began by working on several ornate estates across England but his most famous work is on Stowe House in Buckinghamshire. Bridgeman has a unique style that combines traditional, transitional, and progressive styles. These are comprised of parterres, avenues, and lakes (traditional); garden buildings and lawn amphitheaters (transitional); and borrowed views, in which the eye is drawn into the manmade landscape and natural landscape beyond. Bridgeman’s most famous feature that he created is the ha-ha. He created this ditch when separating Kensington Gardens from Hyde Park for Queen Caroline. It is used as a natural separation that also usefully deters animals from going onto land. Thus, in a similar manner to Brown, Bridgeman was successfully able to implement his designs in landscapes – not just plans and ideas like Kent – and became known for his eclectic style and for the innovative landscape feature of the ha-ha that became used around the UK.

Here is a website that describes the history of the ha-ha, where the ha-ha is mentioned in literature, and where the ha-ha is utilized in gardens and landscapes across the UK.

Claude Lorrain's 1661 "Landscape with the Rest on The Flight into Egypt."  William Kent designed his landscapes with
this type of classical painting in mind to create an idealized, picturesque landscape.

The massive Blenheim Palace landscape by Lancelot "Capability"Brown. This landscape demonstrates the reason why Sir Horace Walpole noted that Brown’s work will be forgotten. Brown copied nature so well that it does not look like the hand of man influenced the design.

Case and point of the function of Charles Bridgeman's innovative ha-ha feature for gardens. It is used as a natural ditch that separates land and also usefully deters animals from going onto land.