At 36, Humphry Repton (1752-1818) retreated to the country after failing in yet another career. He spent his time doing what he truly loved—painting and writing—while learning from a neighbor about the flora and fauna around him and designing landscape projects for friends: “I am impatient to shew you the alterations in my house and lands,” he wrote. “The wet hazy meadows, which were deemed incorrigible, have been drained, and transformed to flowery meads.” When the renowned landscape architect Capability Brown died, Repton named himself Brown’s successor, coining the title “landscape gardener,” because, he explained, “the art can only be advanced and perfected by the united powers of the landscape painter and the practical gardener.”
Repton propelled himself into his new career with savvy advertising and a singular design aesthetic that relied on his lifelong practices of painting and writing poetry. He became known for the bound “red books” featuring his watercolor landscapes from various vantage points, and ingenious overlays that could be lifted and lowered to show clients the “before” and “after.” The liftable flaps were likely inspired by the widely read pop-up and interactive books made for both adults and children in his era.
The Frances Loeb Library holds one of the approximately fifty remaining red books, “Moseley Hall,” in its Rare Books Collection. Scholar A. Reece argues that the books were an extremely effective marketing technique, especially because Repton’s designs were intended to make the landscape look like an improved but still natural setting. “Although more than one hundred years lie between Repton’s Red Books and Eisenstein’s Piranesi essay, a similar concept of montage can be discovered in both cases,” writes Reese. “This montage ensures that the viewer’s attention is drawn from the images themselves to the difference that opens up between the two motifs … [M]ontage as a means of representation has inestimable value for a landscape designer who, in many of his projects, dispensed with spectacular interventions and instead relied on subtle measures…” Repton wrote many essays in defense of his craft and aesthetic, arguing “that true taste, in every art, consists more in adapting tried expedients to peculiar circumstances, than in an inordinate thirst after novelty, &c … this inordinate thirst after novelty, is a characteristic of uncultivated minds.”
Repton explained that the complexity of his role required “a competent knowledge of surveying, mechanics, hydraulics, agriculture, botany, and architecture, as well as other essential tools and skills:…his effects must be studied by the eye of the painter, and reduced to proper scale with the measurement of the land surveyor.”
While Repton never achieved the same levels of wealth and fame as Capability Brown, editors J.C.L. write in their 1840 biography that, “[Repton] enumerates it amongst his many sources of gratitude to Heaven [that] he was blessed ‘with a poet’s feelings and a painter’s eye,…not only for success in my profession, but for more than half the enjoyments of my life.’”
Repton’s work and legacy have been critiqued both in his own era and by contemporary scholars. Jane Austen refers to him in Mansfield Park as “the archetypal ‘improver,’” writes J. Finch, “who destroys ancient avenues in pursuit of the improved modern landscape.” Edward Eigen, senior lecturer in the history of landscape and architecture at the GSD and MDes Narratives domain head, in his essay on the roots of racist incidents in New York’s Olmsted-designed Central Park, writes, ”While descriptions of ‘Pig Town’ or ‘Stink Town’ were rife with anti-Irish sentiment, the unimproved grounds of this neighbourhood presented precisely the sort of ‘natural defect’ that Olmsted has learned from Humphry Repton must be ‘removed or concealed,’” The Irish immigrants and African-Americans whose farming and livestock spaces were unacceptable to Olmsted were removed by the police, who, Eigen writes, were also to oversee the completed park and arrest anyone they perceived to be misusing it.
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Daniels, Stephen. Humphry Repton, Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England. New Haven: Yale university Press, 1999
Eigen, E. (2022). Birds, dogs, and humankind in Olmsted’s ‘Bramble’: a story of Central Park. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 42(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2022.2035164.
FINCH, J. (2019). Humphry Repton: Domesticity and Design. Garden History, 47, 24–38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26589636.
Repton, H. (1792). Mosely [sic] Hall near Birmingham, a seat of John Taylor, Esqr. Frances Loeb Library Special Collections, Rare Books. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:46526300$1i.
Reese, A. (2022). Montaged Gardens – On Paper: The Red Books by Landscape Designer Humphry Repton. Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge, 2(4), 67–84. https://doi.org/10.14361/dak-2022-0406
Repton, H., Loudon, J. C. (John Claudius). (1840). The landscape gardening and landscape architecture of the late Humphrey Repton, esq.: being his entire works on these subjects. A new ed. London: Printed for the editor, [etc., etc.].