Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men by David Brown

Author:David Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

This provision of an advanced and in many cases comprehensive education ensured that by the middle decades of the eighteenth century a new cohort of surveyors and draughtsmen was ready to service the expanding market for improvement. Many first served an apprenticeship as gardeners, surveyors, masons or joiners before becoming clerks of works, and finally businessmen and designers with their own projects and clients.

In addition to an expansion in middle-class education, the changing balance of social power, as well as the sheer scale of economic expansion and technological innovation in the course of the eighteenth century, also ensured that particular spheres of activity became increasingly professionalized. Academies, institutes and other professional associations aimed at controlling standards and membership developed apace. The Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce was founded in 1754 and the Society of Artists of Great Britain in 1761; Brown, Donn, Richmond and White, together with the architect Robert Adam and many others, were members of the former organization (disputes among members – notably William Chambers and James Paine – led to a schism that created the Royal Academy in 1768, with a membership limited to forty carefully selected artists). This rise of the concept of ‘professions’ helped to raise the status, and perhaps the artistic independence, of landscape designers. ‘Gentleman architects’ such as Lord Burlington or Sanderson Miller needed an executive architect or ‘master builder’ to develop their ideas into executable drawings and then to realize the actual building; but the credit for the structure remained with them. Burlington used his protégé Kent to this end; Sanderson Miller used John Sanderson and Brown himself. But, beginning with Charles Bridgeman in the 1720s, leading landscape designers and architects – men like Brown – gradually attained a social status, based on their professional activities, that allowed them to set the artistic pace. Henry Hulton, who had the dubious privilege of joining the newly formed American Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston in 1767, visited his brother-in-law Sir Jacob Preston at Beeston Hall, Norfolk, on his return to England in 1776 and described to his sister how ‘Mr P had one of the Gentlemen Improvers here to modernise his grounds.’94 He was referring to Nathaniel Richmond, and the phrase neatly captures, perhaps with a note of irony, the enhanced status of such men. All this said, professionalism had not yet set fixed limits on what an individual could do; nor was it assumed that any formal training was required to engage in a particular activity, as Brown’s career demonstrates clearly enough. There was still considerable fluidity in the roles of surveyor, engineer, architect or indeed gardener. A person with training in one discipline might readily extend into others: thus Robert Adam, already an architect of some fame, was thought a perfectly acceptable choice as designer of a new pleasure ground at Kedleston in the early 1750s (see p. 118).

The emerging consumer society generated a marketplace for goods and services that, over time, delivered increasing amounts of

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