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William Kent (1685-1748) was a Bridlington boy whose training as an artist in Italy was sponsored by squires from both sides of the River Humber including my kinsman Burrell Massingberd of Ormsby, Lincs. Kent’s correspondence with Massingberd is a significant source for any study of ‘the Signior’ and Timothy Mowl has made good use of it in this entertaining, provocative and stimulating biography which might be said to take the Cant (the architect’s real name) out of Kent.
From the correspondence Massingberd comes across as a moaning minnie and fusspot (doubtless a family failing) and I fear Mowl has got his number. ‘Poor Massingberd,’ he writes, ‘a natural victim of life and of people like Kent.’ The increasingly confident chancer, described by Mowl as ‘a cheerful rogue’, played his patron like a stringed instrument.
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