ssional interest in landscape gardening blossomed: William Windham gave access to botany books from his library. His capital dwindling, he moved his young family in 1788 to Hare Street near Romford, Essex. Capability Brown’s death five years earlier had left a gap in the landscape gardening world that Repton was keen to fill. He sent circulars to land owners he had cultivated whilst in Norfolk and Ireland; thus he tentatively commenced his career as a landscape gardener, a phrase he coined. His first landscape commissions relied on his Norfolk connections: Catton Park, Norfolk, England for the mayor and textile merchant, Jeremiah Ives, and at Holkham, also in Norfolk, for Thomas Coke, a notable farming improver. Arguably, the most successful of his projects in Norfolk was Sheringham Hall some years later.
Repton the Landscape Gardener
Many of his commissions involved the preparation of a folio of plans, drawings and accompanying explanatory text for individual clients: his famous ‘Red Books’. Repton’s approach to landscape gardening contrasted sharply with that of Capability Brown, who invariably worked on a wide canvas that fashioned huge new landscaped parks. Repton, by contrast, more often than not embellished and modified the existing landscape in harmony with nature. And whereas Brown used large perimeter belts of trees to enclose, Repton cut vistas through to ‘borrowed’ features beyond, such as church towers, making them seem part of the designed landscape. He contrived approach drives and lodges in the cottage orné style to enhance impressions of size and importance. Capability Brown acted as both designer and contractor; providing a concept to completion service. By contrast, Repton acted as a consultant, charging for his Red Books and sometimes staking out the ground, but leaving his client to arrange the actual execution. Consequently, many of Repton’s four hundred or so designs remained wholly or partially unexecuted. Also, whereas Brown became wealthy, Repton’s income was never more than comfortable.
The Picturesque Controversy
Repton’s essentially practical, restrained style led him into to the very public ‘picturesque controversy’ with leading art critics, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price. They regarded that landscape re-modelling should imitate contemporary approaches to landscape painting that showed more rugged and intricate landscapes, accompanied by classical motifs and references. Repton’s design solutions produced practical and often restrained designs for his clients. He particularly disliked attempts to impose the classical Italian style on the English climate and landscape. He followed and set out to enhance nature. He describes landscape gardening in the following way:
“The perfection of landscape gardening consists in the four following requisites. First, it must display the natural beauties and hide the defects of every situation. Secondly, it should give the appearance of extent and freedom by carefully disguising or hiding the boundary. Thirdly it must studiously conceal every interference of art. However expensive by which the natural scenery is improved; making the whole appear the production of nature only; and fourthly, all objects of mere convenience or comfort, if incapable of being made ornamental, or of becoming proper parts of the general scenery, must be removed or concealed.”
Some of his designs foreshadowed later popular themed gardens, the laying out of gravel walks and of lawns for use as cricket, bowls and croquet pitches. He also helped popularise the use of terraces and re-introduced separate flower gardens and flower beds. He also replaced earlier classical ornamentation with romantic structures like grottoes and fake ruins. Existing buildings played an integral part in many of his schemes. They both provided reference points and informed his final design for a landscape. At one point in his career he worked, with the architect John Nash, whose early building design suited Repton’s garden style. His son, John Adey Repton, an architect, worked with him and in Nash’s off