Humphry Repton. Landscape Design in an Age of Revolution

Abstract

This book’s first chapter in called ‘Introducing Humphry Repton’, which is a slight surprise, until some reader gets into it and realizes, first, how much Repton differed from his (perhaps more famous) predecessor — ‘Capability’ Brown — and then is faced with Tom Williamson’s question, ‘Why another Book on Repton?” He acknowledges, rightly, two of the most recent and crucial books by Stephen Daniels (1999) and Alain Rogger (2007), but then in later chapters enlarges upon that introductory one by explaining how his own approach adds substantial and extremely welcome insights and directions. Those chapters focus on the shape of Repon’s career, the working methods of his business, central notions of ‘Character’ and ‘Appropriation’, an emphasis in ‘Domesticity’ and ‘Cheerfulness’, and finally on the influence of contemporaries and social change that shaped his style. Even for those who know Repton may find the Introduction, and its ‘Epilogue: Repton’s Legacy’, useful ways to enter into this book. They bracket an authoritative and often fresh examination of his career and its contributions to national landscape history (and, briefly, to that legacy in the USA). If individual aspects of his proposals did not achieve wide acceptance, it was nonetheless that his ‘overall style’ was well suited to the needs of contemporary society, to which he brought ‘hard work’ and exceptional intelligence. He began his professional practice at a point when attitudes and approaches to landscape were ‘particularly suited to the times’ and to his abilities. Yet, as the ‘Epilogue’ argues, his work ‘in many respects did not fully emerge until the twentieth century’ — Williamson notes Denys Lasdun’s perception that his influence was apparent in Williamson’s own campus at the University of East Anglia. (One wonders whether that Reptonian influence and emphasis might tempt Williamson into undertaking another book that studies this legacy). It is a daunting book to review, in part because Williamson largely refuses to contribute to the standard and often too generalized narrative of 18century English gardening; to this he brings a widely researched enquiry into actual sites, either in the Red Books or into whatever original designs have survived: hence an image of Sheringham Hall, designed by the Repton father and son in 1820, or the remains of a grotto or ‘Souterrein’ that remains in an educational establishment at Ashridge. One of Williamson’s more useful remarks is to note that we cannot take refuge in our usual safe havens. He cautions on several occasions against taking on too readily connections between Repton’s style and his clients, for example, or against ‘oversimplified stories’ and approaches that are too closely focused on one approach. So while he properly praises Daniel’s approach from ‘historical and geographical geography’, or Rogger’s art historical discussion of the Red Books (notably their concern with representation and Repton’s concern with what he wanted to promote — his ‘discourses’), Williamson wants to build upon and extend their contributions. Repton himself noted that — it is the concluding sentence in Williamson’s book — ‘It is rather upon my opinions in writing, than on the partial and imperfect manner in which my plans have sometimes been executed, that I wish my Fame to be established’. That his actual work is sometimes hard to identify, in part because he worked early on landscapes that Brown had originally designed and later on small villas where its gardens no longer