Who was that man who set about damming up the River Glyme, changing the very contours of the land, to form the lake at Blenheim?

Who carried out about 170 commissions throughout England during his 30-year career, including Kirtlington Park, Radley, Rycote, Ditchley Park, and Nuneham Courtenay, to name but a few in Oxfordshire? And who was it that on his death was described by Horace Walpole as “Lady Nature’s second husband”?

The answer, of course, is Lancelot Brown (1716-1783), otherwise known as Capability Brown. And anyone interested in finding out more about this extraordinary artist, engineer, gardener, and architect, all rolled into one — whom some say has not yet received his due portion of fame in the pantheon of truly great Englishmen — could do worse than to take the short drive across the county boundary to Compton Verney, in Warwickshire, where the exhibition Capability Brown and The Landscapes of Middle England is on until October 2.

Compton Verney was designed by the Oxford master mason and one-time Mayor of Oxford John Townsend (1648-1728), together with his son William, though it was later remodeled by Robert Adam (1728-1792). But its grounds and lake were laid out by Capability Brown himself — including the lake there, which makes the whole place a little like a miniature Blenheim.

One or two visitors to the exhibition have already criticised it for not making enough of the landscape on its own doorstep to illustrate the illustrious gardener’s ideas. Indeed, most of the windows in the rooms housing the exhibition are kept shuttered, as seems to be the way these days; but the last room, explaining his work at Compton Verney, has its shutters open — and the view through the windows seemed to me to put into practice, as it were, all I had learned in the preceding rooms.

Mr Brown was known as Capability by his grand employers because he always talked about the “capabilities” (meaning possibilities) of any landscape about which he was consulted. He was born into what might be described as a lower-middle-class family at Kirkhale, in Northumberland, and at the comparatively late age of 26 he started work as a gardener for Viscount Cobham at Stowe House. He carried out his first independent commission at Wotton House, Buckinghamshire, in about 1740.

In 1751, he established his landscape design consultancy in Hammersmith. Fellow designer Humphrey Repton later attributed his rapid success thereafter as being due to “a natural quickness in perception and his habitual correctness of observation”. But whatever the cause, by the early 1760s he had become master gardener to George III at Hampton Court and had begun the £21,000 commission for the fourth Duke of Marlborough to reshape the park at Blenheim. He then entered an informal business partnership with the builder-architect Henry Holland (1746-1806), who in 1773 cemented the friendship by marrying his daughter Bridget.

Originally, Brown intended to build a number of Georgian Gothick buildings at Blenheim, centering on a bath house at Rosamund’s Well, but these ideas were never fully completed. Only High Lodge (designed by Brown and still extant near the Combe Gate) and some buildings at Park Farm, later altered out of all recognition by the sixth duke, were ever finished — Brown having been built the latter to house the fourth duke’s animals, including a tiger given to him by Clive of India (shades there of the menagerie kept at the Royal palace of Woodstock by Henry II and later moved to London as a precursor to London Zoo).

By the late 1760s, Brown was a rich man and a member of the landed classes, living on his own estate at Fenstanton in what used to be Huntingdonshire. But there were many, including architect Sir William Chambers, who derided him for being overly romantic. Strange that, for the Sphinx Bridge at Compton Verney, designed either by Brown or Adam, is very similar to the New Bridge (near the Bladon Gate) at Blenheim. Chambers even intended that the New Bridge should have sphinxes on it too.

But perhaps the rudest comment came from Richard Owen, of Cambridge. He told Brown in later life: “I earnestly hope I die before you. I should like to see heaven before you had improved it.”