William Kent

William Kent (1685-1748), English architect, designer, landscape gardener, and painter. He was the most versatile English artist of his period, making distinctive contributions in several fields.

Kent came from a poor Yorkshire family and little is known of his early years. He is said to have begun his working life as a coach painter, leaving before his apprenticeship was complete to seek his fortune in London. In 1709, aged 24, he travelled to Italy, where he remained for a decade. For most of this time he lived in Rome, working as a painter and also as an art dealer—a role that brought him into contact with many wealthy British visitors making the Grand Tour. One of these visitors was Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, who persuaded Kent to return with him to England in 1719. They became close friends and worked together artistically, and Burlington used his money and influence to promote Kent’s career.

Initially, Kent worked mainly as a decorative painter, a field in which his talent was modest (Horace Walpole said he was “below mediocrity”); there are examples of his wall and ceiling paintings (1722-1727) at Kensington Palace, London. However, under Burlington’s guidance Kent turned increasingly to architecture, in which he was much more successful. He worked mainly in a Palladian style (see Andrea Palladio), but he was less doctrinaire than Burlington, also turning his hand to Gothic designs. His best-known building is probably Horse Guards in Whitehall, London, built for the royal cavalry; it was designed near the end of Kent’s life and erected after his death, in 1750-1759.

The design of Horse Guards is rather restless, and much more typical of the Palladianism that Burlington promoted is Holkham Hall, Norfolk (begun 1734), which is Kent’s largest work in domestic architecture and the grandest of all Palladian mansions. It was built for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester who, like Burlington, had met Kent in Italy. Externally, Holkham is almost forbiddingly severe, but internally it is rich and ornate (this difference was in line with Palladian doctrine, summed up by Inigo Jones: “outwardly every wise man carries a gravity…yet inwardly has his imagination set on fire and sometimes licentiously flying out”). The sumptuous and dramatic entrance hall at Holkham is perhaps Kent’s architectural masterpiece.

Kent’s role as an interior decorator extended to designing furniture; indeed, he was the first British artist to conceive an interior and its furnishings as a complete unified work. Typically his furniture is grand and ornate; the finest example is the magnificent state bed (1732) at Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Kent’s other design work was highly varied, ranging from book illustrations and tableware to sculpture (notably the Shakespeare monument (1740) in Westminster Abbey, carved by Peter Scheemakers) and a state barge (1731-1732) for Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, now in the National Maritime Museum, London.

Kent’s most momentous work perhaps came as a landscape gardener, a role to which he devoted much of his later years. He was a key figure in the development of the informal style that was to be particularly associated with Capability Brown, who early in his career continued Kent’s work at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. Several garden buildings by Kent survive at Stowe, but the grounds have been much altered since his day and his ideals as a garden designer can best be seen at Rousham Park, Oxfordshire, where he began work in 1738. He swept away the existing formal arrangement at Rousham, virtually eliminating straight lines and creating winding walks and picturesque features such as cascades and grottoes. Horace Walpole described these gardens as “the most engaging of all Kent’s works”.