Examining the work of a nature-loving designer

THE name Lancelot Brown is unlikely to ring any bells unless the first name is replaced by the prefix, Capability. He is of course the man who transformed the look, the feel and the concept behind the design of the English country-house garden.

He worked in the mid 1700s for the seriously rich aristocracy and managed by dint of considerable powers of persuasion, to get them to agree to have their beautifully ordered and expensively planted flowerbeds swept away so that Mother Nature could be allowed back in.

The show concentrates on Midlands gardens, many of which will be familiar to visitors through the National Trust, and it finishes appropriately and quite cleverly with a room dedicated to Capability’s work at Compton Verney that provides first floor vistas of his handiwork outside. As in the other rooms, the walls are covered in facsimile plans of his proposed alterations that took account of the presupposition that the grounds must look their best through the windows of a horse-drawn carriage. It adds another dimension to the concept of the idle rich.

Accoutrements for the sports they indulged in are also on show – forbiddingly long-barrelled blunderbusses that look capable of taking a servant’s head off at 50 paces and a chain of the sort that would be used by Capability to measure the grounds and used historically by surveyors and to this day, worryingly, by Railtrack as a standard length of measurement between bridges.

The exhibition complements the Stanley Spencer show in the sense that gardens are the central theme. Otherwise they have little in common. Capability’s controlling influence on the landscape and his canny knack of getting the gentry, notoriously reluctant payers, to settle upfront at each stage of the development, suggests a degree of control and organisational skill that Spencer with his shambolic painting pram would never be able to muster. They are both revealed as having a deep empathy for nature at opposing ends of the romantic/classical divide. But for me the products of the pram win the day.

Peter McCarthy

Caption: Bridge at Compton Verney. Picture submitted by Compton Verney.