Book excerpt: Inspired by French and Italian landscape painting, a number of eighteenth-century artist-gardeners led by William Kent created an art-form unique in the West, althought favoured from times of antiquity in China and Japan: the picturesque garden - virtually a landscape picture made not of paint on canvas but of real country and buildings. Towering above the rest of the professional practitioners of this art, in terms both of genius and industry, were two remarkable men, Capability Brown and his successor Humphry Repton. Both transformed many thousands of acres of England and Wales from 'natural' into 'picturesque' landscape; both , in the course of their work, met many of the leading men of their day, and George III made a friend of Brown; both, in their different ways, exerted a lasting influence on other landscape designers, including those of America and Europe. -- Book jacket.