The Lawn by Capability Brown Distinguished His Popular Landscape Design

The genius behind the lawn at Chatsworth was Capability Brown (1716-1783). In the course of his landscape work, he became the one whose style still appears as an integral part of several English gardens.

With the sweeping lawn as the distinguishing component of the design, you can still see it in one hundred fifty surviving gardens in England. To this day Brown’s sweeping lawn is integral to Brown’s original design of the property. It still maintains that view.

The extensive lawn was a true Capabiity touch you saw on any garden landscape by Brown. He repeated it again and again.

In the process Brown became the choice of many land owners for a reason.

By the 1720s, landscape gardening in England had become intensely fashionable. (Tim Richardson The Arcadian Friends]

His style represented the modern garden, even referred to as ‘naturalistic.’ It was unlike the formal style of le Notre in France who designed in a stiffness with a formal style of specific plant choice and placement. It was the garden style noted also in the Dutch and French landscape design.

The garden was to offer a delight to the eyes from the house.

The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were the residents of Chatsworth. It has remained so in the family for over five centuries.

The seat of he Duke of Devonshire has belonged to the Cavendish family since 1549, almost 500 years.

In 1764, the year of the 4th Duke’s death, Brown was appointed King George III’s Master Gardener at Hampton Court.

Formal Design of the Landscape

There was some controversy about Brown’s style of landscape design, but it was modern, and a style many landowners coveted.

Garden historian Norman T. Newton writes, “The most heated arguments about Brown’s efforts developed after his death, but even during his actiive lifetime he seems to have been controversial. A majority admired his work and referred to him as the ‘magician’ but a few found fault with the soft sameness of the results and declared their opposition in polemical publications of the time.

”In effect, this controversy, to which Brown himself made no verbal contribution whatever, fed new life into the incessant literary output — books, pamphlets, essays, poems, letters to the editor — that had started with the Addison-Steels-Pope essays in The Spectator and The Guardian.” All were concerned with the look of the landscape, especially in the eighteenth century when Capability appeared on the scene and reigned supreme through his sweeping lawn.

Brown gave Chatsworth its grand country estate look. It would endure for centuries ever since, up to this very day.