Page "Lancelot "Capability" Brown" Paragraph 10

His landscapes were at the forefront of fashion.

They were fundamentally different from what they replaced, the well-known formal gardens of England which were criticized by Alexander Pope and others from the 1710s.

Starting in 1719, William Kent replaced these with more naturalistic compositions, which reached their greatest refinement in Brown's landscapes.

At Hampton Court, Brown encountered Hannah More in 1782 and 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 '".

Brown's patrons saw the idealized landscapes he was creating for them in terms of the Italian landscape painters they admired and collected, as Kenneth Woodbridge first observed in the landscape at Stourhead, a " Brownian " landscape with an un-Brownian circuit walk in which Brown himself was not involved.