Capability Brown, the most famous of all English landscape gardeners, moved mountains and flooded valleys to create his illusions of idyllic pastoral vistas – but he was staggeringly well paid for his efforts, earning more than the equivalent of £500m, new research on his only surviving account book has revealed.
The neat columns of figures in the small narrow book reveal that during his most productive period, when he is estimated to have transformed more than 500,000 acres of land in at least 250 sites for wealthy clients including the king and six prime ministers, he earned vast amounts of money. Out of the £500m he had to pay the contractors who actually did the work, but it still left him a very wealthy man.
The book is going on display at the Royal Horticultural Society’s library in London from 5 September, to mark the 300th anniversary of Brown’s birth, part of the national Capability Brown Festival.
The book, small enough to fit in a coat pocket, was his personal record of the work he was undertaking and was donated to the RHS by the Morrice family, descendants of Brown’s daughter Margaret.
Conservation work for the anniversary revealed scraps of the goose feather quills with which he wrote.
His accounts have been studied by the economic historian Prof Sir Roderick Floud, along with his banking records at Drummonds, who estimates that by the time of his death in 1783 he had made a profit of the equivalent of some £139m, on a turnover of £840m, a profit margin, Floud notes admiringly, of around 17%.
The account book also records his epic journeys around the country keeping track of all his projects, and the problems he sometimes had getting his clients to pay. In 1765, one Ambrose Dickens of Suffolk proved a very awkward customer. “Mr Brown could not get the money for the Extra Work, and tore the account before Mr Dickens’ face and said his say upon that Business to him.”
His most valuable clients included the king, who paid him the equivalent of £54m for work at Hampton Court. His second best patron was Lord Clive, Clive of India, who himself had faced official enquiries into how he had accumulated such extraordinary personal wealth. Clive spent the equivalent of £51.8m on his grand new house and garden at Claremont in Surrey – still a spectacular landscape garden now owned by the National Trust. The landscaping involved moving the main Portsmouth Road, so it didn’t spoil the vista.
“He was a great businessman as well as an excellent “improver” as he called himself,” Floud said.
- A Capable Businessman, free at the RHS Lindley Library, London, 5 September – 15 October 2016
