Kent was a virtuoso designer of interiors and, as the exhibition shows, able
to turn his hand to anything from dog kennels to state barges to pier
glasses to silverware to uniforms. As a “total designer”, perhaps the
nearest equivalent to Kent today is not any garden designer but a figure
like Thomas Heatherwick, the architect-designer who cheerfully turns his
attention to a wide range of design challenges, from his signature bridges
to furniture, buildings, graphics – and not forgetting the Olympic torch.
But range is not everything; Kent’s abilities as a painter were limited and
most experts agree that his legacy as a furniture designer is founded on his
appropriation of styles encountered in Italy (all that gilding!). It could
be argued (see 4, below) that Kent’s interior work was, in effect, a
training area for the greater wonders he was able to work outdoors. Kent’s
training as a painter helped, of course, but this underestimates the impact
of literature on landscape gardening, and also in Kent’s case the importance
of spatial felicities. He was a master at manipulating outdoor space to
create intense and distinctive garden episodes, as well as an underlying
rhythm that links them together. One has a strong sense of this at Rousham,
his greatest surviving work.
Here are four reasons why William Kent might be considered first as a great
landscape designer:
Portrait of William Kent
1 In the 1730s and ’40s, Kent perfected the English landscape garden
with boldness and imagination, developing the work begun by designer Charles
Bridgeman, poet Alexander Pope and others. Rousham is his surviving
masterpiece, and perhaps the greatest and best-preserved garden of the era
(it is still in the hands of the same family, and open every day of the
year). The 18th-century aesthete Horace Walpole stated that Kent was
“painter enough to taste the charms of landscape… He leapt the fence, and
saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and
valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of the
gentle swell, or concave scoop, and remarked how loose groves crowned an
easy eminence with happy ornament.”
These are innovations generally ascribed to Capability Brown, but Kent was
able to call in distant prospects or conversely to create intense episodic
atmospheres as his will dictated. Kent was the first true artist of the
landscape garden, which was itself England’s greatest contribution to the
visual arts.
A William Kent sketch for the Chinoiserie garden temple
2 Kent was a consummate professional, who rose from humble origins in
time-honoured British fashion. A lad from Bridlington in Yorkshire, he
started as an apprentice coach-painter, was talent-spotted in London by
painter William Talman and then catapulted over to Italy in 1709 for a
decade in company with a wide range of so-called “milordi”: young gents off
on the Grand Tour of Europe. With little money and less social standing,
Kent’s role in Rome developed as a kind of artistic adviser, “teacheroni”
and procurer of objets d’art. He flourished as a result of his manifest
talents and friendly, pragmatic nature. Unaffiliated politically, he got
along well with a wide range of patrons of all political persuasions – in a
fractious period – including the snootiest and most intellectually demanding
of them all: Lord Burlington of Chiswick House. He also worked for the royal
family, notably for Queen Caroline at Richmond, for whom he designed a suite
of notoriously avant-garde buildings including a hermitage and “Merlin’s
Cave”.
3 Kent was bold and brave enough to design the most explicitly
political landscape ever conceived: the Elysian Fields at Stowe. In the
1730s and ’40s, landowners habitually expressed their political and dynastic
affiliations through the ornamentation of their estates. Lord Cobham of
Stowe was sacked from the Whig power base by prime minister Robert Walpole
when he publicly attacked his plans for an Excise Bill, which would
introduce new taxes on freeborn Englishmen. Cobham was so enraged by his
treatment that with Kent’s help (and Alexander Pope’s) he turned the heart
of his landscape garden into a searing critique of what he viewed as the
debased, nepotistic and corrupt Whig government. The Temple of British
Worthies is a curved wall adorned with statue busts of “true Whig” heroes
such as John Locke, Isaac Newton, King Alfred and John Hampden, while the
Temple of Ancient Virtue facing it is a perfect temple peopled by heroes of
the classical past. Adjacent to this he built the sarcastically named Temple
of Modern Virtue: a ruin presided over by a statue that was identifiable as
Walpole himself.
The Temple of British Worthies at Stowe (ALAMY)
4 Kent deployed many of the design ideas he honed in house interiors to
greater effect outdoors. A key Kentian principle is “stacking” elements of
ornamentation one on top of the other – the way chairs, sofas or beds lead
on and up to gilded mirrors and picture frames, to doorcases, ceiling
paintings and chandeliers. (Kent inherited the habit of drawing “elevations”
of his furniture designs from his first master, Talman.) He used this idea
of verticality in his exterior design, too, so that at Rousham, for example,
one has a sense that statues, lawns, groves of trees, buildings, seats and
more distant elements are piled one on top of the other, with the view
foreshortened. In the same way he used the interior idea of the enfilade – a
succession of connecting rooms – in garden spaces, creating visual links
horizontally between them while also manipulating the visitor’s sense of
rhythm. In these and other ways, Kent brought a new level of sophistication to
landscape design.
*Designing Georgian Britain, March 22-July 13, Victoria Albert Museum,
London SW7 (020 7942 2000; vam.ac.uk)
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