I usually have to start giving a talk on a note of apology.
I don't quite know why, but it's particularly fitting now. And first let me say what a delight it
is to be - and an honor - to be invited to New York, to Sotheby's and the ICAA to talk to you. The apology comes when I say
that I had dreamed up the idea - I just hadn't thought, really, about the implications of what I
wanted to talk about, which was that the idea that landscape
is a great art form and that the greatest work of art
at Chatsworth is its landscape and you'll understand that this
is a difficult case to make at Sotheby's. So the second - or was it the
third - rewrite of my talk after seeing the exhibition, the stupendous exhibition
downstairs and left me feeling that really I better get
on a quick flight home. However, we'll have a go. I'm going to give it a go and I
kick off - I gave it the title, "Perfection is One Thing." This is - these are the words of the
essayist William Hazlitt, who was a friend of Wordsworth
and Coleridge, the poets. And I will endeavor to, in my talk, finally bring us back to a
consideration of this idea, perfection is one thing.
But on the face of it, Chatsworth is not one thing.
So how can it be perfect? You've seen the exhibition, you've
seen hundreds of artworks down there. Chatsworth is an amazing place. And this is yet another barrier between me
and endeavoring to persuade you of the truth of my argument. So we have Chatsworth as a house. The fourth Duke is the
richest man in England and he takes on Capability Brown. And I put his name up - I'm not going
to dwell too much on the portraits - but you'll see that his work at
Chatsworth comes to an end pretty much when the fourth Duke
dies, he ties up and goes. So here's another problem. When
you're trying to think about what makes a great work of art, it really doesn't help if the work of
art is incomplete, one might have said, and Chatsworth as a landscape,
Brown's work, is incomplete. It doesn't help if it has no value. And this is particularly
difficult in the context of Sotheby's. You can't sell a landscape. You
can't sell a river and trees. You can't move them onto another owner.
Far from having any value they have - they are a liability. You have to pay money every year to try
and keep the trees from falling down and to plant new ones and that
kind of thing. And yet, one wants to make the case
that this is a work of art. And furthermore, in the case of Brown, and here I'll just introduce
you to Brown very briefly. Brown comes from absolutely the back end
of nowhere, Kirkharle, Northumberland, about 40 miles from the
Scottish border. Actually, that sounds rather anti-Scottish. He comes a mere 40 miles from
that great center of civilization, which we call Scotland. By the age of 24, he's moved to Stowe, the most radical, innovative, revolutionary garden in England in
the 1720s and probably in Europe, and probably in the whole
of the Western world. And by the time he's 27, he is the
head clerk of the works at Stowe. He's taken chargeable
works. By the age of 37, he is recognized as a genius and thus remains, until his death, in this preeminent position.
But he starts from nothing. And he ends up as the Lord
Lieutenant the County. One son is an MP and
other one's an admiral. He's a friend of the King
and of six prime ministers. He's a serious piece of social mobility. But the essence of what he did, and this
is a further problem for Chatsworth, is that when you - the part of Chatsworth I want
to talk about this evening is a part that - and this was something of a
relief - plays no part, whatever, in the huge exhibition downstairs. And it is one that most people to
Chatsworth, visitors to Chatsworth, will just walk past and think nothing of
because they're on their way to the tea shop. And furthermore, Brown didn't want you to
notice what he'd done. And so that again, there's a kind of, when you're trying to promote him as an
artist or some kind of work of art in English tradition, this
very understated tradition, it's a difficult act. You can see, have I apologized sufficiently for
the likely cause of this lecture? In that case, I'm more or
less ready to proceed I think. And so when you go to Chatsworth, it would be really easy for me to show
a whole string of wonderful photographs of amazing Bravura
effects because this - so this is after Brown, this
is the Wellington rock built - it's entirely artificial
- built by Joseph Paxton later. And it's an amazing Bravura achievement
in the rockery at Chatsworth. And similarly before Brown, you have the cascade
which was developed 1707 - 1694, then redeveloped in 1707
by Thomas Archer. And so on. You could show people things
like that and they think, wow. And indeed you should think, wow. And wow is the correct
intelligent response. But this isn't what I want to do. The bit I want to look at is this bit
here on the other side of the river. And just while we're
looking at that photograph, notice the avenue running over the
hill, which I'll talk about later, but notice that it is there. So if we look at the
topography of Chatsworth, the house, if you can see it, is here and it's on one side of an immense south-facing valley. So this is a shot from the north
running down the River Derwent, which he dammed up and greatly
turned into a wider river or wider channel. And it runs away
through this kind of gully, which we'll look at to the south,
to the lowland country of the south. And this is on the moors. And it's known that Brown made the river and changed all the land levels around
here so that you could see the river from the house. Okay. And those are
more huge engineering works. And I don't want to talk about them
either cause I really gonna make it difficult for myself. But there's one little
mention of what - Brown's work is hardly ever mentioned in the records
at Chatsworth - it's known he was there, knowing he did everything, but it's not
in the accounts and it's hardly there. But Horace Walpole,
the famous 18th century correspondent wit, wag man about
town, he came here and he said, Brown is doing something with the river
and he wants to put it in the middle of the park. And before he got there,
the park was on the hill over here. And clearly Brown is trying to
make a park on this side. And this is the part I want to talk about.
This is on the west side of the river. Because so as to make the river run
through the park. So he's got a given. The really simple thing for him to do
is to concentrate on this north/south axis. But he's decided he wants to make
an east/west axis in the garden, in the park. So if you walk down the long canal
pond heading out to the south, more Bravura, wonderful stuff.
It's not Brown. This is not Brown. This is by Wyattville
later, given the dates. You come to this view south and just
have a quick look at the potential for landscape for the ordinary second
rate landscape, as it were. Do you see how, this is
Beeley top and Lindop, and this beautiful U-shaped glacial
valley and you could imagine making a wonderful view through
there, down to the south. And indeed - do see that little building in
the back, that's the mill. Just take it from me. There's a
building there and it's a mill. This is again in the view south. So this is Lindop up here and Beeley
is just behind the trees here. And I really like this because it's
yet another problem with talking about landscape - which I'll return
to - that when you take photographs - this is a
beautifully composed photograph. The photographer was out
early in the morning. There's a light frost which is just
steaming off. There's a bonfire coming up, little bit of smoke coming
up at the background. And do you see how perfectly
it's framed with the outer trees? And then the mill is just through a gap
between the alder bushes on the river, so that you find this position. And
this again, it can persuade you - the photography can persuade you - that
you're looking at a great landscape. But frankly, I could send a photographer to my garden
at the right time in the morning and he'd take a few beautiful photographs
of the thistles and it would look like a terrific garden. You get what I mean? Photographs are hugely misleading and landscape is something else. But
it's so true that in a photograph, in any image, you tend to want an object. You want something that you're
aiming at in the picture. So the bit here again is the west
bank of the river that I really want to talk about. And one way, now forgive me -
people hate looking at maps. It's not going to take long.
But one way to think about, trying to work out if there is some art
in the way the west bank was laid out is to try and deconstruct the landscape by
seeing if it has an internal underlying geometry. And the most obvious kind of
geometry - watch these red lines. The first one I put on is
the line of the cascade, which runs down beside the house. And then I - this is
me as if I was almost, if I was Capability Brown
- it's two in the morning. I'm doodling with a ruler and a pencil,
just trying to think things through. Okay. And so I drew a second
line 900 feet further north, which runs through Queen Mary's
Bower, Tudor remains of Mary, Queen of Scots when she was - attributed
to her when she was in prison at Chatsworth. And then I put it in a
line between the two, 450 feet, and I got Paine's
bridge, which was put in by Brown. So you can start to see that
someone is doing something. And then I twitch those through
lines through 90 degrees, and I get Paine's mill
and the one arch bridge. So do you see that you can just
play and you can start to see how, what the underlying
construction of a landscape is. And what's fascinating about Chatsworth
is that the whole of the house and this thing here, which is the great stove by
Paxton - 1870 - this east side all conforms to this
matrix and yet amazingly the matrix was created in 1680
with the first gardens. Brown respected it because he decides
where the stables are going to go, Paine's stables and the
mill and the bridge, and Paxton comes along another a hundred
years later and he still respects it and yet nobody writes about it. It's
a kind of - it's rather amazing, kind of subconscious
thing that has happened. But it doesn't really affect - this kind
of geometry doesn't really affect this side of the river except in
so far as Paine's bridge is angled at 45 degrees. That's this
yellow line here through the bridge, 45 degrees to the red lines. But it's a minimal intervention. So that's one way of trying
to look at landscape. It doesn't really apply to the
west bank, but you can see it. It's quite an interesting way of trying
to shed light and get to grips with how designers work on a landscape that
actually geometry has a part to play. So this is the west bank from the
house and this is series of - can you see enough? There's the bridge and
this is actually a straight terrace, but you know how
you take a series of photos,
it seems to sort of bend. And at this stage I just want to...I can't
help but draw attention to this tree because I mean, let me be frank, this tree's in the wrong
place. And I don't know, but I bet - I don't know quite how to put this.
I'm as keen a monarchist as anyone, but it's amazing how the commemorative
trees planted by the monarchs all over the country are always in
the wrong place. I mean, I wouldn't like to be quoted on this. And the other thing, I'll come
back to it, but look at this - so this is just me looking in
general at what we've got. It's a landscape like a kind of scroll. You're seeing a great panorama
with the bridge at one end. In Brown's day, there was another building
roundabout here called the parsonage, which I'll come back to. But it's like - to me it's
rather like a medieval scroll. You can take your eyes through it and
see different scenes across the river and from that point of view
this, which is Lindop, and the new plantation. Do you see what a very hard solid
line that makes on the hill? And to my mind it goes on for too
long. This end was planted after Brown. This was Brown. But, in fact I will go back a couple of
pictures just to show you this map. This is the approach. Do you
see this line here with trees? Those are those gray dots beside it. And this is a very Brownian
thing called a sleeve plant. It's a bit like an avenue, but it's just loose groups of
trees to break up the views across. And I've done that because I thought
I would show you the effect of this panorama-like thing when you go to
this - another landscape more or less contemporary with Chatsworth
where Brown works called Burghley, with a very helpful English
spelling of Burghley. And what happens here is that you
have - the house looks out on this panorama. In front of the house is
a lake, which looks like a river. Beyond the lake there are a few trees.
And beyond that there's a drive. So the situation is very similar to
Chatsworth, but what it enables you to do, and Burghley is a really good example, is to see the house as if it's lots
of different houses as you go along. So you get a second view
with these Tudor turrets, and you just see the turrets.
Do you see what I mean? Then you get a third view and it's
almost like a little town with a church. Indeed, Burghley was described
as looking like a town. So there's a way in which
you can use this panorama effect to give you a whole series
of views back and it becomes quite sophisticated. Another way to think about
landscape and works of art is to, well, do you know the famous saying by
William Morris, the socialist, founder of arts and crafts movement?
A hundred years after Brown. I'm going to get it wrong. "Have nothing in your house that you do
not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful." Have I got it
right? In the same way, that west bank of
Chatsworth is about grass and grass is hugely important
for the 18th century economy. And this is the Calton Pasture, which is a thousand acres of
grassland on the Chatsworth estate. And itwas later called the new park. And it's a thousand acres of grass just
for mowing hay because - I make the comparison sometimes out
of complete ignorance except, well, actually no,
not complete ignorance. Born of my reading of Dallas. Dallas, isn't it? It was
a television program, which was very big in the UK and has
taught me all I know about American life. And I know that if you live in Dallas, you need to have a house that
looks out on your oil wells. And in the same way you have a house
that looks out on your grass because that is the 18th century oil well.
The grass fuels the horses. And just to show you - again, I'm flipping to some extent away from
Chatsworth because I do want you to think I'm just making a big deal about
one landscape because this phenomena you see at Chatsworth, you
see in other Brown landscapes. And this is Milton Abbey, which is absolutely fantastic. But here,
this was a thousand day lawn. And even now when it's reverted to arable, it's still a fantastic design. It turns the corner and carries
on for a mile and a half, winding on up the valley. The Combs
Valley, it's called. And here, this was, I, I knew grass was important,
but when I started working on ground, I came across this extremely
lackluster sketch by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, a Swiss sketcher who was
commissioned by P. R. Kaye, the Dean of Lincoln to
travel around England, sketching things he thought were
pretty weird and unusual and so on. And this is Charlton park in
Wiltshire. And if you look carefully, can you see these little
lumps? These are haycocks. All the way round under
the trees is making hay. And I think his foreground
is showing the grass unmoved, before it's mown. So to me it
was a lovely proof about hay. And then in the same
way Jonathan Spyres was Brown's surveyor. And. Fisherwick was regarded as Brown's
masterpiece for Lord Donegall. And unfortunately, the house was taken down only a
couple of years after Brown died and it's now a sewage works, which I have to introduce with
some measure of embarrassment. But the thing that's interesting
here is that Spyres could've done a picture of the wonderful view, the
composition and so on, of the place. But he actually does a picture of
haymaking in the park because that's the function of the park.
The park has a function. We think of parks - if
you just talk about parks, they're just people who are very, very rich and they choose to turn
thousands of acres into grass, you know, just cause they're so rich. I say it's rather like saying
that rich people must buy Rolls-Royces and park them upside down
all along the drive just to show how rich they are. That's not how
you get rich to be frank. You get rich by doing things that
make you money and make sense. And here's another similar
one with the haymaking. Even in summer they're cutting the grass.
Well why are they cutting the grass? They're cutting it to feed the stables. And Chatsworth has a huge new
stables go up in Brown's day. And the point about stables, I don't want to get too
distracted on the stables subject, but the fact of the matter is, if you want to go out for a ride, there's no point sending your groom
out to a 300 acre park with a carrot, hoping a horse is going to
drift your way sooner or later. You keep the horses in the stables.
The horses, they only get out, if they're lucky into a little paddock, but in May or something
when the family's not there. The horses are kept in the stables, which means they have to be fed
with cut grass every morning, all through the year. So stables
become an immense consumer of grass and horse numbers go up fourfold or something
in Brown's career on these estates. The reason being, first fox hunting, which can use five horses per
rider per day and they might fox hunt six days a week. And second because the
turnpike roads were being introduced in England, which suddenly
meant transport was vastly, much easier. And people simpy
travelled much, much more. Before the introduction of turnpike
roads in the Seven Years War with France, it was reckoned that England would
be perfectly safe from invasion because the French couldn't ever get
up our roads. That was the situation. Mmm. So I now want to return briefly
to this map thing and tostart thinking about this west bank and how something that appears so - a few
random trees scattered about and so vague - actually has, quite a
lot of thinking has gone into it. And I'm briefly returning to this map
in order to introduce to you the idea of "point blank," which is a useful term and very useful thinking
about Brown landscape. And if you stand in the middle of
the front door of a classical house, which will tend to have a front door in
the middle and you look straight out at a right angle, that's point blank. And nowadays we mean point blank means
sort of point blank range meaning the gun is very close to the temple
of the guy in the... Again, that's Raymond Chandler. I'm sorry. My
other big influence on education. And if you look at point blank, these red lines - I am going
to get off geometry I promise. But the red lines are what you
might call metrical geometry, because you measure 450 foot and you
draw another line, you measure 450 foot. These yellow lines are what's called
projective geometry and they're based on having a theodolite and Brown
designs with the theodolite which measures angles. And if you take the 45 degrees of the Paine's Bridge, run
it back to point blank, which is this yellow line here, and
then turn it through 90 degrees, so you've got another 45 degree
angle, you get the parsonage, which is this old house. And so you're suddenly seeing something. There's a design there which is
completely different from the Paine's Mill photograph, because the buildings
are on the edge of the design. And if I send a photographer out, he will keep taking a
photograph of Paine's Bridge. No matter how many
photographers you take out, they won't get that these are the framing
devices for something that's going on in the middle. Now that's a rather better picture
because I want to persuade you that this chunk - I was trying
to, on the last picture. Another thought, if you're...well perhaps it's the moment to say it,
but Gilly and I, my wife Gilly, who's in the audience, we run tours occasionally to England because nothing beats actually getting
to the place if you want to understand about landscape. Nothing comes close.
I mean, but I'm doing my best now. However, if you want to go, there's something to be said for going
in the winter because you can see the structure of what you're looking at. And so I just wanted to
comment on this a little bit. This hard line of the distant
horizon, it goes on too long. And as a result, these
middle ground trees here, they don't really show off that there's
a little valley going round the back. And so the landscape
doesn't flow like it should. It would do if these middle ground
trees were tall enough to go over the horizon, like they do
there, you'd get that sense. But I just want to talk about
the general composition. Here's the bridge and this is the
point blank and there's the avenue, look, that gap in the horizon. And so Brown blocks point blank and he does it with this very open
planting of trees here. So you can see the shape of the
park beyond. You can see the shape. It doesn't completely block it out. And on this side, just in front of the
trees, roundabout where the green dot is, that's where the parsonage was,
which was removed in 1790 or so, 20 years or 15 years after Brown died. So if I just take you on, this is Stowe, the remarkable first work, first
really big place that he worked on. And here you can see - this was
actually up in 1760 - but you can see how an earlier design, the eye would have been led to
point blank. Do you see what I mean? To this distant hill. And that seems like the obvious way to
treat the landscape if you have an avenue in the background. But
Brown chooses to block it. And the reason why he does is, if I look at a few other places, again
this is Swynnerton in Staffordshire, this is a view straight
out and there's this clump at point blank with Stafford
Castle on one side and the Recon, another great hill,
monumental on the other side. And what Brown is trying to do with this
point blank - this is an early one - is kind of spread the view out and stop
you just being channeled into the single view, which you have
to see from the front door. If you design a classical house
with the front door in the front and then you have a landscape that's
completely symmetrical around the door, which you'd hope for in a classical
house, then the landscape, unless you're careful, will only
work when the front door is open. And in England having the front
door open is a pretty bad idea. And so you need to have a landscape
that works from the windows. And the simplest way to do that is to
block the view from the front door. So you get this view on this side
composition and this one on this side. But with Brown...so, I'm trying to show
you that I'm not kidding. You know, I've seen this in a number of places
and you see it in different ways. And it becomes, I don't know if you know the
Raphael sort of diptych of Scipio, which has Virtue on one side
and Vice or Beauty on the other and a single tree dividing the two.
So it looks like one landscape, but one single tree divides it.
And in the same way back at Milton, this is Milton Abbey again from
the other end. If you look out east out this way, from the
central window in the middle, do you see a lime tree, right? Bang
in the middle. A single tree just, it's as if he got this idea of point
blank and it was just his way of settling like a sight into the landscape. And it's still more remarkable when
you go to Wardour House, in Wiltshire. So this is looking out from
Jasper Conran's window. He's a designer, English designer.
And do you see - I think Waldour's a bit neglected, but it's one of
the finest achievements of Brown. And right in the
distance, five miles away, bang in the middle is this
clump on Melbury Down? Can
you see that little donut? It's actually a big clump of beech trees, but again it's as if he's using
that as a kind of sighting device. And this down here, which is
rather overgrown, is the lake, widening out to the Lake. And when
it's in perfect condition, this, the south hill, feels as if you could fold it
across this line into the lake. So it gives a kind of complex
symmetry to the design. And this becomes your kind of sighting
device for how you're going to bring symmetry, a kind of level of balance
into a basically unbalanced landscape, because clearly that's a whopping great
hill on one side and there isn't on the other side. And then. I want to look at another favorite topic. Running along just here is a road which you can't see. And Brown was laughed at by the generations after
him for his aversion of showing a road. And he didn't want
to hide the traffic. He liked the traffic animating the scene, but he didn't want you to see the
surface of the road, the gravel surface. And here of course you can see
it's completely successful. And I'm just going to show you a couple
of other more Browns which show how it goes. So here at Audley End
there's the enormous Tudor mansion, here's Brown's rather odd looking
lake when you see it from the air. But it works in practice. And
here beyond it is the Newport Road. And then his park
is, is beyond the road. Here's a portrait of the house by Tomkins. And there you can see the water just
behind the house and the road on the portrait is completely missing.
And in real life it's missing. But if you go to the road, it's actually
built on an enormous embankment, a huge embankment. And that's
because Brown had realized. And so he spent a lot of money doing this, that if you raise the road above the
outline of sight, above eye level, you just saw the bank and then
the bank carried on over the top. And this is more effective
than trying to sink, endlessly sink the road deeper and deeper
and deeper when it just floods and it doesn't really work. And here's just another example. To be frank, I really like the picture. It was one of those evenings you
sometimes get in England where the light becomes - I'm hovering between the words
transcendental and psychedelic. It's somewhere in there. It was so
fantastic, the light. And so I walked out, it was just for five minutes. And
here again, you see the traffic, you see the cars on the road,
but when you go up to the road, you see it's on this embankment
so that you don't really see, don't see the surface.
Do you see what I mean? And my theory about this is
that Brown is actually taking a lot from the painter Claude
Lorrain. Claude Lorraine was so much loved by the English Milords. A French painter painting in Italy. Everything goes back to
France somehow in the end. And what he paints is -
this is a biblical scene, a bridge, an Italianate hilltop town. And there's no connection
between anything. He creates
this kind of timeless, dream-like painting because
things aren't connected. They don't really make sense. I
mean, the bridge looks ruined. So what date are we in?
This appears to be biblical, but these people are really not ruined. And there's something
chaotic in a Capriccio way, which they're brought
together. But the ideas, what you create is this sense
of timelessness, I think, and disconnection because there
isn't a road. And at Chatsworth, you look out and you don't see the road, you just see this space evolving. So this is the...This is an early picture of 1703, Siberechts, and you can see this is the
matrix of the early gardens. Somehow it was retained - the gardens
were removed before Brown got there - but nonetheless, this matrix was retained both
by Brown and by Joseph Paxton, the famous - he built the Crystal Palace. I don't know if you've heard of
Joseph Paxton. He became an MP, another great gardener, and one
of Chatsworth's great heroes. But they retain the matrix. But I put it up here because I now have to make another confession
that for the last few years and the obsession has only
gotten worse in that time. I've become more and more
interested in cottages. And so we're going to have to
see how they're going to be vital to my case, the case
I'm making for art. So, Siberechts shows in this corner,
some cottages. Here's a blow up. You can see it. Quite
nice. Cottages. Stone. Very simple. Gabled. And that's the
- I think that's the old parsonage. And Brown saved it, Brown left it
there. And you might think again, oh, this is just some weird anomaly.
But no, it comes up again and again. So here's Broadlands where he saves
Sparsholt Manor. And there's plenty of trees. That's Romsey Abbey in the
background. This is in Hampshire. Beautiful park. He saves the cottage. And here
back to Milton Abbey again. Milton Abbey, Lord Milton, Joseph Damer, he'd made a packet in
banking in Ireland. Familiar story, the banking anyway,
and making a packet. And he hated - he bought this estate with a town with nine
pubs and two churches and dozens of people and a big school and the boys
from the school used to hop over the wall and scrump his apples. So
he said, I've had enough of that. I'm getting rid of the town.
And he got rid of the town. As you do, I mean be reasonable. But in the middle of his pleasure
ground, despite doing that, he saves a cottage. Green Lane cottage, right bang in the middle
of his pleasure ground, opposite the house with 200
yards from the house, something. And yet the cottage - cottages were dreadful
places to be at the time. Gainsborough, he paints these fancy paintings of that
destroyed thatch and dilapidated plaster and 13 children tumbling out of the earth
floor where they had one mattress to sleep on. And it's all pretty
dreadful. He's not alone. Samuel Palmer also draws the cottages and even Edensor. Edensor is the estate village
at Chatsworth and again, conveniently English speakers, spelled E D E N S O R. Edensor, obviously. And even Edensor was described as filthy children in dilapidated
cottages or something in 1830. And this was in
the middle of the estate. Cottages were dreadful places to be. And there were several attempts
to try and rethink the cottage. And this is the most famous,
Blaise Hamlet, Bristol. And this is very much influenced
by - largely drawn by the son of this great designer
Humphry Repton. This is 1810, roughly. And these, you might be
reminded of the Petit Hameau at Versailles, for instance. But the difference here is that this
isn't for Marie Antoinette to go and play at being a shepherdess. These were genuine
cottages for workers on the estate. And they are marvelous
buildings, fabulous jeu d'esprit. They were largely drawn by George Stanley
Repton when he was 24 or so, a young man being allowed to go wild,
I think. The circular cottage, a particular favorite of mine.
So that was one way to go. But there was a big move against that. A lot got written about cottages and what
to do with them and they were divided into two kinds. The natural cottage,
which was, I can quote here, "a provision against real ones
making use of those materials, which the spot whereon it
is to be situated produces
and often of the cheapest kind, rude and unadorned." And
those were natural cottages. And those are the ones that people
really thought were cool. Okay. And alternatively there's this
kind, the affected cottage, "a studied luxury for the supply of no
real want at all...the returned East Indiaman may be deemed
absolutely necessary, as having brought a principle part of
the requirement materials." In other words, a completely different attitude. So there was a move
going back to the 1770s with Nathaniel Kent, a famous land agent, that the vernacular cottage
which we so love today, but using the local materials - it
all sounds very much on cue with climate change and all that - this was a better way to go than these
kind of over the top models. Although these are fabulous
buildings and were very much visited and influential from the
moment they were built. They're lovely. So going briefly back to Chatsworth,
there is a natural cottage, this is one, it's still in the park. So it's another example of a cottage
being left in the middle of the park. These ordinary cottages,
no barge boarding, not tarted up with kind of lattice
windows and little fancy bits and pieces. It's just a cottage. And let me be frank at this point. I
don't really know why Brown does this, but he emphatically does do it. But there's some things you can say about
that and that's what I'm coming onto next. So I want to just revert
quickly to Brown and how Brown himself deals with the
cottage. And remember, I'm still aiming to get back to that
business about perfection is one thing and why Chatsworth is a masterpiece. So just
hang on to that thought. Stay with me. Brown moves to Stowe. He's 24 and he moves into
the Boycott building, a beautiful folly, neoclassical
folly by Gibbs, James Gibbs, famous architect. And every
morning when he gets up, he looks out towards the New Inn, which was built in 1713 and at the time, when Stowe was developing all
this classical architecture,
the Palladian bridge, the most amazing architecture.
This is a bog standard, 17th century style coaching inn. And furthermore - I've
dealt a lot with this, with the National Trust who
own it. And they kept saying, this is the front. Well in a sense that is the front
because that faced the road. Okay. But it was the other side that faced the
park and that was seen from the park. And when you look at the
other side, that's to my mind, that's the front and it's not
just that. But attached to that there's this cottage fully in view of
the park when it was in Brown's day and from Brown's house. Built
in 1713 by the estate. So they knew what they're doing. And here's the old blacksmith's shop
which again would have been visible from the park. In the 1760s a
bell got put in which hid it, but it wasn't there when Brown was there. And the blacksmith's shop
is thought of, in England, - the bad side is that it is...it
was a center for - actually, I'm in America. The really good side is that this was
a center for republican sentiment, and because it was a warm spot because
you had the fire going all day. People could hang out. On
the other good side, then, is that it's a rather beautiful sight
to see the sparks of the anvil and the everything going off at night. You
know, when the blacksmith is working. But that was there. And so Brown saw this every morning when
he got up and had a shave and looked out the window. And he then came on to try to
build model villages himself. And this was one of the early
ones. Nuneham Courtenay. And strikingly Nuneham
Courtenay, which has the most influential flower garden
ever made in England by William Mason. It's now run by the Center
for World Peace, I think. Anyway. Fantastic. But
in this flower garden, or adjacent to it, was
another ofthese old cottages. So he built the new village, it's
this kind of barrack, frankly, it's not great. It's on the Redding Road. But in the pleasure ground was the
little house of Babs Wyatt and all the visitors to Lord Harcourt used to go
and see Babs Wyatt for a cup of tea. And from her window she could see the
dreaming spires of Oxford four miles away. And she'd never been there.
She'd never been off the estate. This was cottage life.
And so she was a good, a great character. So he starts
building things like this. And at Milton Abby again,
when Lord Milton, Joseph Damer brings down the town, he builds a model village and the houses
are designed by Sir William Chambers, but Brown designs the village. And here is the village still
today and it's very beautiful. I say it's very beautiful, but all the houses are the same and it
looks a bit like a council estate, social housing, what do you call it?
A housing project. A housing project. You call them that? With thatch.
A housing project with thatch. And so he builds that. Then now I come to kind of
realizing what it's all about. This is Belvoir Castle and I
happened to be working there at the same time as I
was working at Milton. And when you look out from
the terrace of Belvoir Castle, you see Woolsthorpe Village. And I wouldn't really have
thought anything about it. Belvoir Castle is right on top of a hill. You could hardly avoid seeing
Woolsthorpe Village if you wanted to. But I was aware, I became aware
that this wood at the back, this was planted by Brown. So he planted a wood to keep
the village inside his park. Okay. To keep a whole village inside his
park. And if you go into the village, again, these are just ordinary houses. They made look very
quaint to you. But to us, these are just village houses.
There's no barge boarding, you know, the fancy wooden kind of bits that
come down the edge of the gable. There's no lattice windows,
hanging baskets. Well, probably, hanging baskets, they came later. But
do you see what I mean? It's - to us, a very ordinary village, which
he puts into his landscape. And here was the absolute
clincher. Because at Milton Abby, I've said he saves one cottage
inside the pleasure ground. He builds a model village. And then
at the end of his time, Brown, again, he incorporates this
village into the landscape, which is on the left here. And he puts a wood behind it to make
sure it's brought into the embrace of the landscape. And because I'd seen Hilton... It's a village of Hilton in
Nelson. And really helpful. And I'd seen this and I'd seen
Woolsthorpe and Belvoir at the same time, and I knew it couldn't be -
and since then I've seen more, but otherwise I'd have just walked
down the lane and thought, Oh, this is a pretty picture. Oh, this
would make a really good postcard. Do you see what I mean? So this brings me to my peroration. Maybe what Brown did...maybe art is not about making
a most beautiful thing. Maybe art is about showing us
a new way to look at the world. Maybe Brown saw the cottage, these dilapidated cottages with
a thatch and the 13 children, he could see them as beautiful because
he was able to look at the thing itself. And so by the end of his
life, Chatsworth...well no, Chatsworth was in the middle. But
certainly by the end of his life, he's saying, do less. You don't need to tart up the village.
The village is perfect in itself. And we in England and you in
America, you come to England, you see our villages and you
see them perfectly beautiful. It's because you have had
hardwired into your imagination the idea of the village that he
saw first. And I want to end, more or less end - there's
always something else - with this quotation from Coleridge describing the work of his friend
Wordsworth, the two famous poets. After the publication of lyrical
ballads, the most single, most influential volume of poetry
ever written in the English language. I put it to you. In 1798. Coleridge was describing Wordsworth's work and I think it's pretty good. Can I read it? Can I read it? "Like the moisture or
the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor
false colors its objects, but on the contrary brings out
many a vein and many a tint which escaped the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what
had often been kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveler on
the dusty high road of custom." It's not a perfect definition
of something art can do, to take the obvious thing you've walked
past every day and not thought about and say, Hey, this is
fantastic. And this is why. You see the Sotheby's exhibition
downstairs and it's one artist after another trying to raise
to the amazing challenge set by Chatsworth because of the quality of
the building, the fantastic collection, the munificence of the Duke
and Duchess. And Brown here, he just says, do less. You don't have to struggle so hard
and that's the end of my talk.
