Humphry Repton (21 April 1752 – 24 March 1818) was the last great designer of the classic phase of the English landscape garden, often regarded as the successor to Capability Brown. His style is thought of as the precursor of the more intricate and eclectic styles of the 19th century. His first name is often incorrectly spelt "Humphrey".
Unlike Brown and other famous predecessors, he only worked as a designer, not the contractor for executing his designs, and therefore made much less money. Many of his famous sketches with folding sections survive; these gave "before and after" views for his clients. He appears to be the first person to describe himself (on his business card) as a landscape gardener.
Biography
Early life
Repton was born in Bury St Edmunds, the son of a collector of excise, John Repton, and Martha (née Fitch). In 1762, his father set up a transport business in Norwich, where Humphry attended Norwich Grammar School. At age twelve, he was sent to the Netherlands to learn Dutch and prepare for a career as a merchant. However, Repton was befriended by a wealthy Dutch family and the trip may have done more to stimulate his interest in 'polite' pursuits such as sketching and gardening.
Returning to Norwich, Repton was apprenticed to a textile merchant, then, after marriage to Mary Clarke in 1773, set up in the business himself. He was not successful, and when his parents died in 1778 used his modest legacy to move to a small country estate at Sustead, near Cromer in Norfolk. Repton tried his hand as a journalist, dramatist, artist, political agent, and as confidential secretary to his neighbour William Windham of Felbrigg Hall during Windham's very brief stint as Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Repton also joined John Palmer in a venture to reform the mail-coach system, but while the scheme ultimately made Palmer's fortune, Repton again lost money.
Repton's childhood friend was the botanist James Edward Smith, who encouraged him to study botany and gardening; Smith reproduces a long letter from Repton in his Letter and Correspondence. He was given access to the library of Windham to read its works on botany.
Landscape gardener
His capital dwindling, Repton moved to a modest cottage at Hare Street near Romford in Essex. In 1788, aged 36 and with four children and no secure income, he hit on the idea of combining his sketching skills with his limited experience of laying out grounds at Sustead to become a 'landscape gardener' (a term he himself coined). Since the death of Capability Brown in 1783, no one figure dominated English garden design; Repton was ambitious to fill this gap and sent circulars round his contacts in the upper classes advertising his services. He was at first an avid defender of Brown's views, contrasted with those of Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, but later adopted a moderate position. His first paid commission was Catton Park, to the north of Norwich, in 1788.
That Repton, with no real experience of practical horticulture, became an overnight success, is a tribute to his undeniable talent, but also to the unique way he presented his work. To help clients visualise his designs, Repton produced 'Red Books' (so called for their binding) with explanatory text and watercolours with a system of overlays to show 'before' and 'after' views. In this he differed from Capability Brown, who worked almost exclusively with plans and rarely illustrated or wrote about his work. Repton's overlays were soon copied by the Philadelphian Bernard M'Mahon in his 1806 American Gardener's Calendar.
To understand what was unique about Repton it is useful to examine how he differed from Brown in more detail. Brown worked for many of the wealthiest aristocrats in Britain, carving huge landscape parks out of old formal gardens and agricultural land. While Repton worked for equally important clients, such as the Dukes of Bedford and Portland, he was usually fine-tuning earlier work, often that of Brown himself. Where Repton got the chance to lay out grounds from scratch it was generally on a much more modest scale. On these smaller estates, where Brown would have surrounded the park with a continuous perimeter belt, Repton cut vistas through to 'borrowed' items such as church towers, making them seem part of the designed landscape (coincidentally a concept common in East Asian gardening). He contrived approach drives and lodges to enhance impressions of size and importance, and even introduced monogrammed milestones on the roads around some estates, for which he was satirised by Thomas Love Peacock as 'Marmaduke Milestone, esquire, a Picturesque Landscape Gardener' in Headlong Hall.