Three hundred years after his birth, Lancelot “Capability” Brown has so comprehensively infiltrated our national consciousness that our notion of what is beautiful in the English landscape is almost entirely of his making.
At the end of the 17th century, the dominant taste was for rigidly formal gardens inspired by Versailles: an imperious style that proclaimed man’s confident dominance over nature.
Brown established in its place a definitively English style that deliberately blurred the boundaries between art and nature. This was understood as both an aesthetic and political rebuff to French tyranny and autocracy.
The Guardian: Gardens: how Capability Brown transformed this green and pleasant land
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