Early Life and Stowe
Lancelot Brown was born in the tiny village of Kirkharle, Northumberland, and educated at Cambo School. He mastered the principles of his craft by serving as a gardener's boy at Sir William Loraine's modest seat at Kirkharle Hall. In 1739 he moved south, where his first landscape commission was for a new lake in the park at Kiddington Hall, Oxfordshire. He moved to Wotton Underwood, Buckinghamshire, a minor seat of Richard Grenville, Lord Cobham. In 1741, he joined Lord Cobham's gardening staff at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, where he served under William Kent, one of the founders of the new English style of landscape garden. While at Stowe, Brown married a local girl named Bridget Wayet and had the first four of his children.
As a proponent of the new English style, Brown became immensely sought after by the landed families. By 1751, when Brown was beginning to be widely known, Horace Walpole wrote somewhat slightingly of Brown's work at Warwick Castle:
- The castle is enchanting; the view pleased me more than I can express, the river Avon tumbles down a cascade at the foot of it. It is well laid out by one Brown who has set up on a few ideas of Kent and Mr. Southcote.
In 1764 he was appointed Master Gardener at Hampton Court Palace, succeeding John Greening and residing at the Wilderness House.
Read more about this topic: Lancelot "Capability" Brown
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or stowe:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)