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E-book Capability Brown, Royal Gardener : The Business of Place-Making in Northern Europe
Yet Brown’s family lived in Kirkhale, in Northumberland, a fairly typical small rural community, over 300 miles to the north, far from the glittering metropolitan world. His father, who died in 1720 when Brown was only four, was a farmer and land agent to the local lord, Sir William Loraine, yet the young Brown was educated at the local school in Cambo – possibly through the good offices of Loraine. Clearly an important family on the estate, Brown’s elder brother John became the estate surveyor and married Sir William’s daughter, whilst another brother, George, became a mason and architect in neighbouring Wallington, and also married into a local gentry family. Brown started as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkhale, where he may also have learned estate management under the tutelage of Loraine, who was a keen improver (Figure 1.1). Brown moved on at the end of the 1730s – probably to Lincolnshire, where it has been suggested he learned engineering and water management, before he appeared in Oxfordshire, from where he was recruited by Lord Cobham to work at the famous gardens of Stowe (Bucks) in 1741. Brown arrived at Stowe, the epicentre of political and aesthetic change that was transforming designed land-scapes, only two years after leaving his home in Kirkhale, suggesting that the distance between a local northern estate and metropolitan society might not have been so far in the mid-eighteenth century. At Wallington, for example, Brown’s brother George was mentored by Daniel Garrett, who had been Lord Burlington’s clerk of works and was a colleague of William Kent.
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