His life was littered with great patrons royal and noble the first two Georges and Frederick, Prince of Wales, appointed him Master Carpenter and Master Mason, invented for him the post of Inspector of Paintings in the Royal Palaces, and on the death of Charles Jervas he was at last, in 1739, at the age of 55, appointed Portrait Painter to the King though George II sensibly declared that he would never sit for him, for by then everyone had realised that Kent was not the English Raphael and his reputation had begun to fade. George Vertue, Kents contemporary, whose observations on art in England in their day formed the first systematic account of the subject, was contemptuous, condemning him as an untalented placeman; his ally Hogarth went further with neither England nor Italy ever produced a more contemptible dauber.
That their view of Kent on his death in 1748 held sway is not surprising, for Kents taste was heavily Baroque but without the flight and fantasy of his predecessors Bernini and Borromini, and utterly lacking the common-sense elegance of Fontana; his contemporary in Turin, Juvarra (of whom he may not have known, though he was briefly in that city early in November 1719), was an infinitely more exciting architect. Worst of all for Kents posthumous reputation was the sweeping tide of Rococo all over Europe, light, deft and enchanting, in contrast to his heavy and exaggeratedly stately style it could reasonably be argued that, far from being a faithful follower of Palladio, he weighed down that genius with his sense of pomp and his monumental mannerisms.
Heavily Baroque: the Kings Staircase and Ceiling at Kensington Palace Historic Royal Palaces
But who was William Kent? We know what he was in later life, but the who remains elusive. How was it that a boy born William Cant in 1685, in Bridlington, then a prosperous market town noted for its many annual fairs, the son of a common joiner, could have so attracted the patronage of the local gentry that, at the age of 24 and having changed his name from Cant to Kent, they sent him off on the Grand Tour to Italy, supporting him there for 10 years? It is said that he went to the local grammar school and was apprenticed to a coach-painter in Hull, but this is not supported by documents (though the oldest coach-builder in the country was the Yorkshire firm of Walter Rippon, 1555-1958, and there might be something lurking in its history). All that we really know is that his mother died in 1697 and that in 1709 he was in London, signing himself William Cant... limner. Who taught him to limn (that is to draw and paint)? It is surprising that he claimed no master, nor, when he was famous, did any master claim him as a pupil.
What were his youthful charms, I wonder, and how thick his Yorkshire accent? Was he, as David Hockney was to be, an amusing pet for the aristocracy? Was he, like Roy Strong, not only clever (in the best sense of that word), but something of a chameleon? Or is there the very simple answer that one of the local aristocrats was his father and that he was educated almost as a gentleman? One writer in the exhibition catalogue has him as warm, affable, witty, extrovert... bubbling with erudite learning though without offering evidence; another (there are 15) quotes Lady Mary Wortley Montagus quip on bisexual ambiguity and goes on to suggest that in the relaxed atmosphere of the court, Kents relationship with Lord Burlington might have had its amorous dimension.
In Italy he joined the studio of Giuseppe Chiari, a pupil of Carlo Maratta I wonder if some of the appalling duds in the Maratta Room in Houghton Hall were not only framed by Kent, but painted by him? His output of paintings copies and originals was, in the circumstances, prodigious, for he supplemented his various pensions from England by acting as a proxy collector of all sorts of works of art and playing cicerone (guide, companion, comforter) to other Grand Tourists, often of the grandest kind. Of these the most important were Thomas Coke, future Earl of Leicester and builder of Holkham Hall in Norfolk (to designs by Kent), and Richard Boyle, exquisite and aesthetically driven, the youthful Earl of Burlington who was to take Kent into his household, and in whose arms the great genius died, then to be buried in the Burlington family vault. Both men were significantly younger than Kent, Coke by 13 years, Burlington by a decade.
And still we ask who was this William Kent? He seems at once to have had contacts with the highest levels of society in Italy, both visiting English and resident Italian, to have been given commissions by Italians (who should have known better), and even to have won second prize for painting at the Accademia di San Luca. We have no portrait of him earlier than a head by Benedetto Luti, a far superior painter whom Kent had known since his arrival from Rome in 1710, and who may have been an influence. It is, I suspect, a fragment of a full-length portrait, and with no costume to distract us we see only a decidedly plump face with a double chin, a petulant little mouth and a disagreeable air of hauteur; he is 34 and soon to return to London. At 40 or so he was painted by the plodding William Aikman, an immediate contemporary from Scotland who had recently come to London seeking patronage; he too gave Kent the double chin and little mouth, but the air is now complacent. In a self- portrait two years later Kent looks down on the great staircase of Kensington Palace, and in this he has run to fat, the cheeks now so plump that they pinch the once large eyes. In Burlingtons household from the day of their return together from Italy in 1719, Burlingtons Countess observed Kents fondness for food and affectionately referred to him as Kentino and ye little Signor. Did he assume tiresome Italian manners, I wonder?
Visual delight: the Gallery at Chiswick House by William Henry Hunt, 1828 Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth The exhibition is disappointing in its modesty. If Kent is known for anything, it is for opulence and grandeur in great rooms and splendid staircases, their theatre controlled by unity and uniformity, by concept rather than impulse, but this we can divine only from small things, from prints and drawings, plans and elevations, from ponderous gilt furniture and the fine frames of paintings of such poor quality as can occasionally still be found in Londons auction rooms on a bad day. All these are crammed hugger-mugger into too small a space, yet, if Kent was ever inspired, it was in furnishing vast rooms in which assemblies met, in his ability to turn every wall into a decorative architectural scheme in which furniture, paintings, curtains and cut-velvet wall hangings combined to form, as it were, a rhythmic architectural faade. Isolated in an exhibition, his ornate furniture, titanic in ambition, laden with detail and far too sculptural for its purpose, may seem more than mildly absurd; but against a wall, under a painting, these cumbrous monstrosities are far more than seats and tables, and in Kents eye were part of an aesthetic unity, part of the process of completing a house in which every detail of colour, material and texture played its part. He was, in this, the inventor of what in Germany, a long century later, was called Gesamtkunstwerk the complete or total work of art though the music should be by, not Wagner, but Handel, Kents very close contemporary.
In this exhibition we see proof of Hogarths judgment that Kent was a contemptible dauber, and his draughtsmanship too is exposed as that of a hapless amateur; but to be fair to him, Kent should be judged only in his houses and palaces, not in the mean circumstances of a meagre exhibition in the V&A. Five minutes in one room of Houghton proves him to have been capable of the most accomplished fusions of architectural convention, decoration and embellishment.
William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain is at the V&A, SW7 (020 7942 2000, vam.ac.uk) until July 13. Sat-Thur 10am-5.30pm, Fri 10am-9.30pm. Admission 8, concessions available.
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William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, V&A - exhibition review
