Book Review: William Kent

William Kent: Designing Georgian Britainedited by Susan WeberYale University Press, 2013 When you picture a stereotypical English country house in your mind's eye - whether it's Brideshead or or Blandings Castle or Downton Abbey - odds are you picture the handiwork of a vivacious, kind-hearted man you've never heard of. The landscaper of a thousand lovely dreams has become a footnote.The massive, lavishly gorgeous Yale University Press volume William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain hopes to change that. It accompanies a stunning exhibit now showing at Bard College in New York and preparing to decamp to London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014. The book, filled with color photos and running to nearly 700 oversized pages, is almost an exhibit in its own right, and it will, as such books do, outlast both the show that inspired it and the longest memories of that show. It's here to stay, a gigantic, expensive commemoration of a man whose great fame in his own day has dwindled to guided tours and speciality monographs. The book is heavy and expensive, but it will sell well at exhibits on both sides of the Atlantic, for anybody who meets William Kent will want to keep up the acquaintance.So it was in his own day too. He was born in 1685 in Bridlington in Yorkshire and likely worked as an apprentice sign-painter in Hull as a young man. He must have shown already some of the polymath and autodidactic talent for which he'd later become known, because a group of businessmen agreed to pay to send him to Italy in 1709 to study painting. He remained there for ten years and made a host of helpful connections with patrons, from Sir William Wentworth to Thomas Coke, the future Earl of Leicester, to, most importantly of all, Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, who was to become his close friend, patron, landlord, and near-inseparable partner for the rest of their lives. Horace Walpole called Burlington "the Apollo of the Arts" and meant it only partly ironically: His Lordship was not only a generous patron but a more-active-than-usual dabbler.In Italy Kent absorbed the art and architectural styles of a world far removed from his native island (he also worked like a beaver in ransacking and illegally exporting huge chunks of that world to England at the behest of his wealthy patrons), and he returned to England as an extremely energetic and personable ambassador the late baroque traditions he'd imbibed in Rome and its environs.His timing was perfect, as becomes evident over and over again in the 21 essays editor Susan Weber has gathered for this big book. The swelling wealth and power of the English ruling class at home and abroad was giving rise to new architectural needs among the elite, as Julius Bryant writes in his lively essay "From 'Gusto' to 'Kentissime': Kent's Designs for Country Houses, Villas, and Lodges":

The wish of erudite gentleman-architects to re-create republican Rome in modern Britain necessitated not only civic buildings of symbolic value in the capital, but also country houses where they could emulate Pliny the Younger and escape the cares of city life, as at his seaside villa at Laurentium.

Bryant goes a bit further, touching insightfully on the aforementioned ransacking:

The missing ingredient that explains his appeal to country house owners might be dubbed the "Grand Tour syndrome." Kent kindled the more personal sense of nostalgic among alumni, not for the republican Rome of their school texts, but rather for the greatest years of their lives, the years of travel before they came of age ... where guests would be reminded of their heady days out hunting for masterpieces, outmaneuvering Papal controls over exports, and now enjoying the trophies of their cultural safaris.

Those cultural safaris brought their treasures back to country villas that were rapidly evolving new needs, especially the need to feel established, naturally inseminated into the far older orders of the natural world. Gardens and elaborate parklands were designed to look undesigned, and the natural features themselves were enlisted to provide the privacy formerly tasked to gates, walls, and moats. As Mark Girouard writes in his 1978 masterpiece Life in the English Country House:

These exquisitely artificial slices of nature in the midst of civilization were soon being copied on a larger scale all over the country ... But their influence spread over the countryside and gradually changed it. A city garden on the site of the future Lower Regent Street had developed into what is now taken for granted as part of the English landscape.

"Kent," Juilus Bryant sums up, "gave Britain's new leaders their own sense of style." And they were enthusiastically grateful, starting at the very top, as Stephen Bindle details in a fantastic chapter on Kent's royal commissions:

William Kent returned to England after ten years' residence in Italy in December 1719. In February 1722 he received the commission to decorate the ceiling of the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace and for the next fifteen years, his work for the royal family formed one of the dominant themes of his life and work ... [which] covered the range of his astonishingly broad and varied output - architecture, interior decoration, garden design, mural painting, canvas painting, furniture design, silver design, and costume design. He enjoyed a remarkable degree of favor and access, and he developed a role for himself which in the whole of British history can probably only be compared to the role played by his hero Inigo Jones at the (admittedly very different) court of Charles I.

That astonishing range of Kent's creative output is given detailed analysis in these essays. The full range of contradictions embodied in this man's desperately avaricious huckster's life - this man who was satirized by Hogarth, upstaged by Pope, chided by Swift, and overshadowed fore and aft by architects with names as exotic as his is bland, Inigo Jones and Capability Brown - is honored with first-rate recent research. "The true extent of William Kent's work in country houses may never be known," Bryant writes with gentle humor, "Between the pages of Country Life, Architectural History, and the Georgian Group Journal, polite controversy simmers." Those polite controversies simmer in these pages too: when, for instance, Frank Salmon writes about Kent's sketches for a new Parliament House and barks, "In the abortive Parliament designs, Kent was far more than merely a cipher for Burlington," he's actually responding to a man forty years dead, the historian Rudolf Wittkower who originally made that crack about Kent being a cipher to his aristocratic friend.That kind of comprehensiveness is standard-making, but of course it comes with some telling limitations, foremost among them partisanship and exclusivity. The partisanship crops up quite often in these pages, as when Nicholas Savage, in a very good essay on Kent's work as a book illustrator, starts off defensively and can't help but go on in that vein:

Horace Walpole's damning criticism of the illustrations in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1751) - "The most execrable performance you have ever beheld" - has cast a long shadow over William Kent's reputation as a book illustrator.

But the simple truth about a man who spreads himself as broadly as Kent did is that the layers are usually uneven in depth. At the peak of his popularity, Kent was sought after for artistic designs for everything from cow barns to ball gowns to special-occasion cakes. He knew nothing about these things and had no instincts for them, but he never turned down ready money, so there's much in his legacy for his defenders to defend. But what he did best he did better than anybody: the shaping of those stately country seats, the crafting of the bucolic getaways that for the Georgian power-brokers were also becoming locations of out-of-town wheeling and dealing. In a flash, the owners of those country seats were all seeking Kent's aesthetic advice: Ditchley Park Wanstead House, Tottenham Park, Boynton Hall (near his hometown of Bridlingon), Chiswick Hall (at which Bryant re-assigns much of the work lately attributed to Burlington), Houghton Hall, Raynham Hall, Lodge Park, Esher Place (all but the tower of which was demolished in 1805), and many other places come into focus in turn as these essays progress. Holkham Hall (Coke's famously overwhelming country estate), Honingham Hall, Donnington Hall, the resplendent Rousham House (then as now the seat of the Dormer family and about as beautiful an example of Kent's work as can still be seen), Wakefield Lodge in the forest of Whittlewood (rebuilt by the Duke of Grafton in 1747 from Kent's solid, powerful designs) - readers are toured through these places by scholars who know them thoroughly, thus softening the exhibit's only real drawback, which is that the very nature of Kent's best work makes it impossible to put on tour. The absolutely stunning little nooks and crannies Kent created on the grounds of Rousham possess charms so exquisitely shaped that not even photography can capture them; you literally have to be there.But what a book can do, this one does. Here we get investigations of Kent's Gothic revival at Hampton Court Palace, his designs for the Prince of Wales' royal barge in 1731 (complete with rampant lions and engraved quotes from Pope's Homer), his plans for the Royal Mews, the Treasury Building, some of Whitehall, and the sprawling assault of Horse Guards Building, the construction of which commenced two years after Kent's death and the design of which Frank Salmon calls "his ultimate statement on Palladian public architecture." We get contributions by renowned Kent scholars like John Dixon Hunt and John Harris (who wrote the outstanding revised entry for Kent in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). And accompanying this throughout we get gorgeous photographs of every delicate copse and monolithic ministry. The whole package is as good as a catalogue raisone can get; inquisitive readers who manage to get to either exhibit must of course own a copy - but so, really, should anybody who's ever daydreamed about strolling down the northwest picture gallery to the solarium for a spot of tea.