Lancelot "Capability" Brown - Subsequent Reputation

Subsequent Reputation

Brown's popularity declined rapidly after his death, because his work was seen as a feeble imitation of wild nature. A reaction against the smooth blandness of Brown's landscapes was inevitable; the landscapes lacked the sublime thrill which members of the Romantic generation (like Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price) looked for in an ideal landscape, where the painterly inspiration would come from Salvator Rosa rather than Claude Lorrain. During the nineteenth century he was widely criticised, but during the twentieth century his popularity returned. Tom Turner has suggested that the latter resulted from a favourable account of his talent in Marie-Luise Gothein's History of Garden Art which predated Christopher Hussey's positive account of Brown in The Picturesque (1927). Dorothy Stroud wrote the first full monograph on Capability Brown, fleshing out the generic attributions with documentation from country house estate offices. Later landscape architects like William Gilpin would opine that Brown's 'natural curves' were as artificial as the straight lines that were common in French gardens.

Brown died in 1783, in Hertford Street, London, on the doorstep of his daughter Bridget, who had married the architect Henry Holland. Horace Walpole wrote to Lady Ossory: "Your dryads must go into black gloves, Madam, their father-in-law, Lady Nature’s second husband, is dead!". Brown was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul, the parish church of Brown's small estate at Fenstanton Manor (a fact memorialized on his tombstone).

Brown's portrait by Nathaniel Dance, c. 1768, is conserved in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

His work has often been favorably compared and contrasted ("the antithesis") to the œuvre of André Le Nôtre, the French jardin à la française landscape architect. He became both "rich and honoured and had 'improved' a greater acreage of ground than any landscape architect" who preceded him.