Capability Brown: Designing the English Landscape

By John Phibbs

In celebration of his 300th year, a definitive survey of Capability
Brown's most famous gardens and landscapes in Britain. Widely
acknowledged as the most influential landscape designer of his age,
Lancelot "Capability" Brown was to England what Frederick Law Olmsted
was to America—responsible for shaping the very ideal of the nation's
parkland. Brown's ambition was to bring out of a landscape the best of
its potential rather than impose his own ideas upon it. His designs are
organic, weaving gestures of color and perspective into the features
that the country already afforded. So natural are his designs, and so
perfectly do they complement the houses within them, that for many a
Capability Brown landscape is the epitome of the English estate. His
gardens and parklands—as much as the houses themselves—would become
icons of British country life. Published to coincide with the
tercentenary of his birth, this remarkable book illuminates fifteen of
Brown's most celebrated landscapes. To love the great English estates is
to love the settings with which Brown surrounded them—from idyllic
parklands at Milton and Broadlands to structured landscapes around
iconic houses at Blenheim, Burghley, Wakefield, and Chatsworth. With
photography commissioned for the book, and including rarely seen
archival drawings that shed light on Brown's process, this book serves
as a guide to Britain's most beloved landscapes and an exploration of
the masterful mind behind their creation. Publisher: Rizzoli

Code: 33885

Member price: $58.50