Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

John Potvin, ed., Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 296 pages, hardback ISBN: 978-1472596642, $115 /  paperback ISBN: 978-1472596635, $30.

Since the publication of Edward Said’s groundbreaking work Orientalism 35 years ago, numerous studies have explored the West’s fraught and enduring fascination with the so-called Orient. Focusing their critical attention on the literary and pictorial arts, these studies have, to date, largely neglected the world of interior design. Oriental Interiors is the first book to fully explore the formation and perception of eastern-inspired interiors from an orientalist perspective.

Orientalist spaces in the West have taken numerous forms since the 18th century to the present day, and the fifteen chapters in this collection reflect that diversity, dealing with subjects as varied and engaging as harems, Turkish baths on RMS Titanic, Parisian bachelor quarters, potted palms, and contemporary yoga studios. It explores how furnishings, surface treatments, ornament and music, for example, are deployed to enhance the exoticism and pleasures of oriental spaces, looking across a range of international locations. Organized into three parts, each introduced by the editor, the essays are grouped by theme to highlight critical paths into the intersections between orientalist studies, spatial theory, design studies, visual culture and gender studies, making this essential reading for students and researchers alike.

John Potvin is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches on the intersections of art, interior design and fashion. He is the author of Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (Manchester University Press, 2014), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (Ashgate, 2013), and Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding (Ashgate, 2008). He is also editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion (Routledge, 2009) and co-editor of Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (Ashgate, 2010) and Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity (Ashgate, 2010).

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Inside Orientalism: Hybrid Spaces and Modern Interior Design, John Potvin

Section I: Modes of Display and Representation
Introduction to Section I
1  The Emptiness of Western Aesthetics Versus the Aesthetics of Eastern Intimacy: A Reading of Interior Spaces and (Colonial) Literary Impressionism in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Victor Vargas (Cogswell Polytechnic)
2  The Exhibitionary Re-production of ‘Islamic’ Architecture, Solmaz Mohammadzadeh Kive (University of Colorado)
3  Promoting the Colonial Empire through French Interior Design, Laura Sextro (University of Dayton)
4  Orientalism and David Hockney’s Male-positive Imaginative Geographies, Dennis S. Gouws (Springfield College and the Australian Institute of Male Health and Studies)
5  The Excessive Trompe l’Oeil: The Saturated Interior in Tears of the Black Tiger, Mark Taylor (University of Newcastle) and Michael J. Ostwald (University of Newcastle)

Section II: Gendered and Sexual Identities
Introduction to Section II
6  On Oriental Interiors in Eighteenth-Century British Women Writers’ Novels, Marianna D’Ezio (Luspio University for International Studies of Rome)
7  Bachelor Quarters: The Spaces of Japonisme in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Christopher Reed (Pennsylvania State University)
8  Coming Out of the China Closet?: Performance, Identity and Sexuality in the House Beautiful, Anne Anderson (Exeter University and Kingston University)
9  Orientalism, Collecting and Shame: Inside Rolf de Maré’s Hildesborg Estate, John Potvin (Concordia University)

Section III: Spaces and Markets of Consumption
Introduction to Section III
10  Paradise in the Parlour: Potted Palms in Western Interiors, 1850–1914, Penny Sparke (Kingston University)
11  Traveling in Time and Space: The Cinematic Landscape of the Empress Theatre, Camille Bédard (McGill University)
12  Oriental Spaces at Sea: From the Titanic to the Empress of Britain, Anne Massey (Middlesex University)
13  Posturing for Authenticity: Embodying Otherness in Contemporary Interiors of Modern Yoga, Lauren Bird (Queen’s University)

Index

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Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Marilyn Palmer and Ian West, Technology in the Country House (London: Historic England Publishing, 2016), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1848022805, $120.

The country house has long been an important part of British cultural heritage, beloved not just for its beautiful architecture, furniture, and paintings, but also a means to reconnect with the past and the ways in which families and their households once lived. With Technology in the Country House, Marilyn Palmer and Ian West explore how new technologies began to change country houses and the lives of the families within them beginning in the nineteenth century. A wave of improvements promised better water supplies, flushing toilets, central heating, and communication by bells and then telephones. Country houses, however, were often too far from urban centers to take advantage of centralized resources and so were obliged to set up their own systems if they wanted any of these services to improve the comfort of daily living. Some landowners chose to do this, while others did not, and this book examines the motivations for their decisions.

Marilyn Palmer is emeritus professor of archaeology and president of the Association for Industrial Archaeology. She is the author or editor of many books, including, most recently, Industrial Archaeology: A Handbook. Ian West is an archaeologist and engineer.

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Distributed by Yale UP:

Heather MacDonald, ed., French Art of the Eighteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-0300220179, $25.

This beautiful book brings together ten years of research on a superb collection of 18th-century French masterworks, which was formed by the late Michael L. Rosenberg and is now on deposit at the Dallas Museum of Art. This research, originally presented in lectures at the museum by an impressive roster of scholars and curators of European art, combines close studies of individual paintings by such artists as François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Louis Léopold Boilly with rich accounts of the historical, cultural, and political climates of their time. The works, many of which have not yet been widely published, span elegant portraits, intimate genre paintings, erotic canvases depicting mythological themes, and bloody images of the hunt. Through careful reconstructions of the lives of these artworks—from their first audiences to their contexts of display—the essays in this book unfold the history of a century of French art.

Heather MacDonald is program officer at the Getty Foundation.

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C O N T E N T S

• Walter Elcok, Foreword
• Lawrence Barzune, Dedication to Michael L. Rosenberg
• Philip Conisbee, Michael L. Rosenberg’s Eighteenth Century
• Kathleen Nicholson, Beguiling Deception: Allegorical Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century France
• Mary D. Sheriff, Love Hurts: On the Pleasures and Perils of Love in Eighteenth-Century French Art
• Mary Tavener Holmes, Nicolas Lancret and Tale of Three Collectors
• Amy Freund, Good Dog! Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the Politics of Animal Painting
• Christoph Martin Vogtherr, Moving on from Watteau: Jean-Baptiste Pater and the Transformation of the Fête Galante
• Alastair Laing, Artist in a Garret: The Young Boucher in Rome
• Deborah Gage, Fired by Passion: Michael L. Rosenberg’s Sèvres Tableau and the French Royal Prerogatives of Ceramics and Stag Hunting
• Eik Kahng, Greuze’s The Dreamer: Portrait, Tronie, or Fantasy Figure?
• Aileen Ribeiro, The Mirror of History: The Art of Dress in Late Eighteenth-Century France
• Susan L. Siegfried, Louis-Leopold Boilly: Between Genre and Portraiture
• Anne L. Poulet, On the Run: Clodion’s Bacchanalian Figures

Bibliography
Index
Photography and Copyright Credits

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The DMA celebrates the book with a lively evening of events on Thursday, October 27, from 5:00 to 9:00pm . . .

Annual Fête: Celebrating French Art of the 18th Century
Dallas Museum of Art, 27 October 2016

Step back in time to 18th-century France at the inaugural Annual Fête celebrating French painting and sculpture from the Michael L. Rosenberg Collection. Arrive in style with an 18th-century–inspired costume for a chance to win a copy of French Art of the Eighteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art and two tickets to the upcoming exhibition Art and Nature in the Middle Ages.

Performance
18th-century music from members of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

Self-Guided Tour
Depart on a grand tour of art from our global collection made during the 18th century.

Talk — Greuze’s The Dreamer: Portrait, Tronie, or Fantasy Figure?
7:00pm  Heather MacDonald shares a brief history of the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation before introducing Eik Kahng, contributor to the new Michael L. Rosenberg Collection catalogue.

Curator Q&A in the Galleries
8:00pm  Heather MacDonald, Nicole Myers, and Eik Kahng answer questions about the Rosenberg Collection.

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From Routledge:

Satish Padiyar, Philip Shaw, Philippa Simpson, eds., Visual Culture and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (New York: Routledge, 2016), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-1472447111, $150.

Individually and collectively, the essays in this cross-disciplinary collection explore the impact of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on European visual culture, from the outbreak of the pan-European conflict with France in 1792 to the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Through consideration of a range of media, from academic painting to prints, drawings and printed ephemera, this book offers fresh understanding of the rich variety of ways in which warfare was mediated in visual cultures in Britain and continental Europe.

The fourteen essays in the collection are grouped thematically into three sections, each focusing on a specific type of visual communication. Thus, Part One engages with historically specific ways of transmitting messages about war and conflict, including maps, prints, silhouette imagery and war games produced in France and Germany. Part Two considers popular and elite imagining of war between 1793 and 1815, encompassing readings of paintings by Turner, Girodet and Goya, Portuguese anti-French drawings and British satirical book illustrations. Part Three concentrates on visual cultures of commemoration, addressing British theatrical reenactments and museum collections, and British and Dutch paintings of the Battle of Waterloo. As such, the volume uncovers fascinating new visual material and throws fresh light on some of the more canonical visual representations of conflict during the first ‘Total War’.

Satish Padiyar is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century European Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art. He is author of Chains: David, Canova and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France (2007) and editor of Modernist Games: Cézanne and His Card Players (2013). He is currently preparing a monograph on Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester. He is author of Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002), The Sublime (2006) and Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (2013), and editor of Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (2000). He has written essays on military art in the Romantic period for Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850: Men of Arms (2013) and Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture (2015).

Philippa Simpson is Client Project Manager at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She was co-curator and catalogue author of Turner and the Masters (Tate Britain, Musée du Louvre, Museo del Prado) and Blake and British Visionary Art (Pushkin Museum) and has contributed essays to Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude (2012), Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century, Art, Music and Culture (2012) and Sexy Blake (2013).

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction—Contested Views: The Image in the First Total War, Satish Padiyar, Philip Shaw, and Philippa Simpson

Part One: Cultures of Participation
1  The Territorial Imaginary of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic War, Katie Hornstein
2  Beholder, Beheaded: Theatrics of the Guillotine and the Spectacle of Rupture, Stephanie O’Rourke
3  Smuggled Silhouettes: Opacity and Transparency as Visual Strategies for Negotiating Royal Sovereignty during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Allison Goudie
4  Wargaming: Visualizing Conflict in French Printed Boardgames, Richard Taws
5  Battle Lines: Drawing, Lithography and the Casualties of War, Sue Walker

Part Two: War and the Image
6  From the Nore: Turner at the Mouth of the Thames, Richard Johns
7  Ghosts and Heroes: Girodet and the Ossianic Mode in Post-Revolutionary French Art, Emma Barker
8  King Ferdinand’s Veto: Goya’s 2nd and 3rd May 1808 as Patriotic Failures, Simon Lee
9  “The most atrocious [acts] one may imagine”: The So-called Series of the French Invasions and Anti-French Propaganda during the Peninsular War, Foteini Vlachou
10  The Comic View of Johnny Newcome’s Military Adventures, Neil Ramsey

Part Three: Cultures of Commemoration
11  Reality Effects: War, Theatre and Re-enactment around 1800, Gillian Russell
12  Ephemeral Histories: Social Commemoration of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the Paper Collections of Sarah Sophia Banks, Arlene Leis
13  Exhibiting the Nation’s Navy: The Foundation of the National Gallery of Naval Art, 1795– 1845, Cicely Robinson
14  Picturing the Battlefield of Victory: Document, Drama, Image, Susan L. Siegfried

Distributed in North America by The University of Chicago Press:

Julian Holder and Elizabeth McKellar, eds., Neo-Georgian Architecture, 1880–1970 (London: Historic England, 2016), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1848022355, $100.

Neo-Georgian design, which began with a revival of the Georgian ideals of symmetry and classical proportion in the late nineteenth century, has exerted a powerful and enduring influence on English-language cultures around the world. Neo-Georgian Architecture, 1880–1970 assesses the impact of this movement through a consideration of the buildings, objects, institutions, and actors involved, contending that Neo-Georgianism was not simply another dying gasp of Revivalism but a complex assertion of national image and identity with a complicated, and at times fraught, relationship to modernism.

Julian Holder is Lecturer in the History and Theory of Architecture department at the University of Salford. Elizabeth McKellar is Professor of Architectural and Design History at the Open University.

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C O N T E N T S

Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Louise Campbell

1  Introduction: Reappraising the Neo-Georgian, Julian Holder and Elizabeth McKellar

I: Origins of the Neo-Georgian
2  Quality in Quality Street: Neo-Georgian and Its Place in Architectural History, Alan Powers
3  The Call to Order: Neo-Georgian and the Liverpool School of Architecture, Peter Richmond
4  Georgian London before Georgian London: Beresford Chancellor Rasmussen and ‘The true and sad story of the Regent’s Street’, Elizabeth McKellar

II: Developing the Neo-Georgian Language
5  Edwin Lutyens: Wrenaissance to Neo-Georgian, Margaret Richardson
6  Emanuel Vincent Harris: Civic, Civil and Sane, Julian Holder and Nick Holmes
7  Giles Gilbert Scott and Classical Architecture, Gavin Stamp
8  C. H. James: Neo-Georgian: From the Small House to the Town Hall, Nick Chapple

III: Establishing a New Tradition: Typologies of the Neo-Georgian
9  Banker’s Georgian, Neil Burton
10 A State of Approval: Neo-Georgian Architecture and His Majesty’s Office of Works, 1914–1939, Julian Holder
11 Neo-Georgian: The Other Style in Britain’s 20th-century University Architecture?, William Whyte

IV: Neo-Georgian: A Prelude to Modernism?
12 ‘Modern Swedish Rococo’: The Neo-Georgian Interior in Britain, c. 1920–1945, Clare Taylor
13 ‘A Live Universal Language’: The Georgian as Motif in interwar English Architectural Modernism, Elizabeth Darling

V: Global Neo-Georgian
14 The Neo-Georgian in New Zealand, 1918– 1939: Architectural Revivalism at the End of Empire, Ian Lochhead
15 ‘Phony Coloney’: The Reception of the Georgian and the Construction of 20th-Century America, Stephen Hague

Index

Coming this fall from Routledge:

Iris Moon, The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France (New York: Routledge, 2016), 260 pages, ISBN: 978-1472480163, $150.

French architects Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) became the most celebrated decorators of the French Revolution and achieved success as the official architects of Napoleon Bonaparte. This book explores how Percier and Fontaine created the Empire style and a system of decoration that engaged with the difficult politics of the period. Taking seriously the architects’ achievements in interior decoration, furnishings, theater designs, and publications during the early and most active period of their collaborative practice, their integral role in reestablishing the luxury market in Paris after the Terror, cultivating the taste of a new clientele, and creating sites of power through their interior decorations are explored. From meeting rooms designed to resemble military encampments to gilded imperial thrones that replaced Bourbon fleur-de-lys with Napoleonic bees, the architects moved beyond a Neoclassical idiom in order to transform the symbols of monarchy and revolution into an imperial ideology defined by a contradictory aesthetics. At the heart of Percier and Fontaine’s decorative work and central to grasping the politics of the Empire style is a dialectical tension between the search for a monumental architecture of permanence and the reliance upon portable, collapsible, and mobile forms. Percier, Fontaine and the Politics of the Empire Style will contribute new interdisciplinary perspectives on the relationship of the decorative arts and architecture with the political culture of post-revolutionary France and how interior decoration engendered a new awareness of time, memory, and identity.

Iris Moon is a visiting assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute. She specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art, architecture, and the decorative arts.

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C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Finding Revolutionary Architecture in the Decorative Arts

1  Visionary Friendship at the End of the Ancien Régime
Clean Sheets and Water Magic
Architects in Training
Roman Fever
Solo Missions
An Etruscan Friendship

2  Propulsion and Residue: Constructing the Revolutionary Interior
Rome à Rebours
Staging Antiquity and Austerity
Revolutionary Rearrangements
Seek, Record, Destroy
The Eternal Return of Luxury

3  The Recueil de décorations intérieures: Furnishing a New Order
Paper Studios
Furnishing Techniques
Strategies of Redaction
Consuming Desires
Writing Against Fashion
Between the Lines
Empire Styles

4  The Platinum Cabinet: Luxury in Times of Uncertainty
Pastoral Pastimes
Incorruptible Precision
Fast Times in Consulate Paris
Haunting Season

5  Tent and Throne: Architecture in a State of Emergency
Après Coup
Fantasies of the Ideal Villa
A Permanent Work in Progress
Little Pleasures
The Moving Bivouac
Political Theology
Divorcing the Past

Coda: Revolutionary Atonement

The Capability Brown Festival 2016 has marked the 300th anniversary of the landscape designer’s birth in August 1716. This week, a major conference addressing Brown and his international significance takes place in Bath, and now come the books!

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

David Brown and Tom Williamson, Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men: Landscape Revolution in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1780236445, $45.

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown is often thought of as the innovative genius who single-handedly pioneered a new, naturalistic style of landscape design, but he was in fact only one of many landscape designers in Georgian England. Published to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Brown’s birth, this book casts important new light on his world-renowned work, his eventful life, and the wider and robust world of landscape design in Georgian England.

David Brown and Tom Williamson argue that Brown was one of the most successful designers of his time working in a style that was otherwise widespread—and that it was his skill with this style, and not his having invented it, that linked his name to it. The authors look closely at Brown’s design business and the products he offered clients, showing that his design packages helped define the era’s aesthetic. They compare Brown’s business to those of similar designers such as the Adam brothers, Thomas Chippendale, and Josiah Wedgwood, and they contextualize Brown’s work within the wider contexts of domestic planning and the rise of neoclassicism. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book celebrates the work of a master designer who was both a product and harbinger of the modern world.

David Brown is a tutor of landscape history at the University of Cambridge. Tom Williamson is professor of landscape history at the University of East Anglia and the author of many books, including An Environmental History of Wildlife in England, 1650–1950.

C O N T E N T S

1  The World of Mr Brown
2  Gardens and Society, 1700–1750
3  The ‘Brownian’ Landscape
4  The Brown Connection
5  Landscape and Modernity
6  Alternatives and Oppositions
Conclusion: Afterlife and Legacy

References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

From Rizzoli:

John Phibbs, with photography by Joe Cornish, Capability Brown: Designing the English Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 2016), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0847848836, $65.

In celebration of his 300th year, a definitive survey of Capability Brown’s most famous gardens and landscapes in Britain. Widely acknowledged as the most influential landscape designer of his age, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was to England what Frederick Law Olmsted was to America—responsible for shaping the very ideal of the nation’s parkland. Brown’s ambition was to bring out of a landscape the best of its potential rather than impose his own ideas upon it. His designs are organic, weaving gestures of color and perspective into the features that the country already afforded. So natural are his designs, and so perfectly do they complement the houses within them, that for many a Capability Brown landscape is the epitome of the English estate. His gardens and parklands—as much as the houses themselves—would become icons of British country life. Published to coincide with the tercentenary of his birth, this remarkable book illuminates fifteen of Brown’s most celebrated landscapes. To love the great English estates is to love the settings with which Brown surrounded them—from idyllic parklands at Milton and Broadlands to structured landscapes around iconic houses at Blenheim, Burghley, Wakefield, and Chatsworth. With photography commissioned for the book, and including rarely seen archival drawings that shed light on Brown’s process, this book serves as a guide to Britain’s most beloved landscapes and an exploration of the masterful mind behind their creation.

John Phibbs set up the Capability Brown 1716–2016 Partnership and is a renowned garden historian and author with more than thirty years’ experience in the management and restoration of historic landscapes. Joe Cornish is an award-winning landscape photographer and an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society with a studio and gallery in Yorkshire, England.

This one is an interesting economic model of publication. Historic England is the publisher, but at least a portion of the funding depends upon supporters (‘subscribers’ to use the eighteenth-century term) pledging money at Unbound. Hearing John Phibbs pitch for the project in the 3-minute video is fascinating: in effect, the ‘elevator pitch’ is directed toward potential readers rather than an editor. –CH

John Phibbs, Place-Making: The Art of Capability Brown, 1716–1783 (London: Historic England, 2016), 320 pages, £50.

Capability Brown was a great artist, and this book shows what his artistry consisted of. His influence on the culture of England has been as great as that of Turner, Telford and Wordsworth.

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783) is the iconic figure at the head of the English landscape style, a tradition that has dominated landscape design in the western world. He was widely acclaimed for his genius in his own day, lived on personal terms with the king, a friend of five prime-ministers, and the great men of his day.

Two factors make his astonishing achievements relevant to us today: first the scale at which he worked and the prolixity of his commissions have given him a direct influence on some half a million acres of England and Wales (that’s an average size English county); and second, arising from that, Brown didn’t just transform the English countryside, he also transformed our idea of what it is to be English and what England is. His work is everywhere, but goes largely unnoticed, the phrase ‘Invisible in plain sight’ comes to mind. Even today though he has had biographers, his work has generated very little analysis.

Very little of what he wrote survives, but the reason why he isn’t noticed—and this point was made in his own day in the 18th century—is that his was such a naturalistic style that all his best work was mistaken for untouched nature. This has made it very difficult to see and understand, which leaves us in a strange situation today. Of the 250 or so country houses for which he designed parks, about 200 are still worth seeing, and millions of people every year visit the 140 that are at least occasionally open to the public. Yet if you were to ask any one of these visitors the simplest questions about the parks (‘what are they for?’, ‘how do they work?’, ‘why did they need so much grass?’ ‘what do they have to do with country houses?’, for example), they would look at you bemused, as if you had asked what mountains are for. For people who are used to English landscape, parks simply are what they are: parks have grass because they are parks.

This blindness to these obvious questions is not confined to the general public. Professional landscape architects, academics and those involved in landscape conservation would be no more able to answer them. It is not just that there is no consensus in understanding Capability Brown’s work, but there has been no attempt to understand it. Even the framework of language for understanding it is lacking. For all his acknowledged importance, Brown is a blank. This book for the first time answers these simple questions about the English landscape tradition and Brown’s place in it, but it aims primarily to make landscape legible, to show people where to stand, what to look at and how to see.

John Phibbs read Classics at Oxford and then developed the idea that historic parks and gardens could and should be recorded and analysed like any other works of art, and that this would be a sensible first step towards deciding what should happen to them next. This idea was widely adopted after the great storm of October 1987. John Phibbs himself spent the next five years building up his own practice in landscape management and assessing landscapes for English Heritage. It was an amazing education out of which came the realisations that Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was not only the most prolific but also the greatest of the English landscape gardeners, and that his work had long been misunderstood, largely because of the mischievous attacks made on it by the proponents of the Picturesque style, which arose after his death in reaction to his work. In this book John hopes to put right the wrongs that have been done to Brown’s reputation and to re-establish him in his rightful place as a figure of great significance in the characterisation of England and Wales.