20 Facts About Capability Brown

Capability Brown is most famous for the landscaped parks of English country houses, many of which have survived reasonably intact.

Capability Brown submitted plans for much smaller urban projects, for example the college gardens along The Backs at Cambridge.

Capability Brown designed more than 170 parks, many of which survive.

Capability Brown was nicknamed "Capability" because he would tell his clients that their property had "capability" for improvement.

Capability Brown's influence was so great that the contributions to the English garden made by his predecessors Charles Bridgeman and William Kent are often overlooked; even Kent's champion Horace Walpole allowed that Kent "was succeeded by a very able master".

Lancelot Brown was the fifth child of a land agent and a chambermaid, born in the village of Kirkharle, Northumberland, and educated at a school in Cambo until he was 16.

Capability Brown moved to Wotton Underwood House, Buckinghamshire, seat of Sir Richard Grenville.

In 1741 Capability Brown joined Lord Cobham's gardening staff as undergardener at Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire, where he worked under William Kent, one of the founders of the new English style of landscape garden.

Capability Brown made the Grecian Valley at Stowe under William Kent's supervision.

Lord Cobham let Capability Brown take freelance work from his aristocratic friends, thus making him well known as a landscape gardener.

In 1764, Capability Brown was appointed George III's Master Gardener at Hampton Court Palace, succeeding John Greening and residing at the Wilderness House.

At Hampton Court Capability Brown encountered Hannah More in 1782 and she described his "grammatical" manner in her literary terms: 'Now there' said he, pointing his finger, 'I make a comma, and there' pointing to another spot, 'where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.

Capability Brown's art attended to the formal potential of ground, water, trees and so gave to English landscape its ideal forms.

Capability Brown produced more than 100 architectural drawings, and his work in the field of architecture was a natural outgrowth of his unified picture of the English country house in its setting:.

Humphry Repton observed that Capability Brown "fancied himself an architect", but Capability Brown's work as an architect is overshadowed by his great reputation as a designer of landscapes.

Capability Brown's reputation declined rapidly after his death, because the English landscape style did not convey the dramatic conflict and awesome power of wild nature.

Dorothy Stroud wrote the first full monograph on Capability Brown, fleshing out the generic attributions with documentation from country house estate offices.

Capability Brown became both "rich and honoured and had 'improved' a greater acreage of ground than any landscape architect" who preceded him.

Capability Brown's father was an alderman and landowner while her family had surveyors and engineers among its members.

Capability Brown was buried in the churchyard of St Peter and St Paul, the parish church of Capability Brown's small estate at Fenstanton Manor.