Humphry Repton (1752-1818) is arguably, along with Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the most celebrated landscape designer that England has produced. His busy 30-year career coincided with an increasing popular interest in landscape design and was sustained by a steady stream of wealthy landed clients from both the old estates and the nouveaux riche of late Georgian England.
Repton was a pioneer of the "picturesque" style of garden design, which reacted against formal styles of gardening that were more popular on the continent. He preferred to capitalise on the natural beauty inherent in the estates on which he worked, and maintained a sentimental attachment to what he saw as traditional English country life, something that was increasingly seen to be under threat with industrialisation and the Napoleonic Wars.
Most of the landscape designs were based on schemes developed for clients in his celebrated 'Red Books'. The Red Books contained illustrations with lifting flaps, which produced a “before and after” effect to support the design proposals set out in the text.
During his career Repton consulted on at least 350 landscape projects of varying scale, but spent more time at Cobham Park than any other, consulting regularly over twenty years. He worked with leading architects of the day, including James Wyatt, designer of the Darnley Mausoleum. Repton invented many of the phrases still in use today in landscape architecture and was in many senses a founding father of the modern profession.
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