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Histories and gazetteers

Landscapes in line and ink

Some of the earliest accounts of Brown landscapes are to be found in gazetteers, county histories and annals of individual families. This genre of literature was well established by the time Brown and his peers began their radical transformation of country estates. Nonetheless, the rapid expansion of the publishing industry, along with a growing fascination for British antiquities and topography, produced an increasingly diverse market for such accounts. As a general rule, authors and artists sought to convey the venerable character of a house alongside the novelty of any recent alterations. In these accounts the grounds were frequently acknowledged as being of equal interest to the house, exemplified by the description of one of Brown’s commissions in A Concise and Accurate Description of the University Town and County of Cambridge (1790). Here, Wimpole Hall was characterised as ‘a noble seat of the Earl of Hardwicke, where great improvements have been made, as well in the plantations and gardens, as in the house’. The popularity of such histories endured long after many of the estates for which Brown worked had been redeveloped or sold, and continues in the guidebooks produced by organisations such as the National Trust and English Heritage.