THE OMNIPOTENT MAGICIAN by Jane Brown, reviewed by John Barrell

Capability Brown famously compared the rhythm of views he created with the rhythms of writing: “there I make a comma, and there, 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”. This passage was enough to persuade Christopher Hussey that Brown was not “particularly sensitive to visual impressions”. “These are not the symbols a visual artist would use; rather those of a literary mind”, he declared, with all the confidence of a period of art criticism in which art and illustration, the “painterly” and the “literary”, were treated as polar opposites. To many eighteenth-century eyes, however, his parks were the realization, in three dimensions, of the landscapes of Claude Lorrain, more avidly collected in Britain than anywhere else, and supposedly the embodiment of nature itself. For the critic of landscape arts Sir Uvedale Price, “Claude” and “nature” were synonyms; and for many people in the last decades of his life (though not, as it happens, Price himself), “Brown” meant “nature” too...