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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. Yet there is something rather touching in Massingberd’s belief that Kent’s potential as a painter would make him ‘a second Raphael’. Although Mowl has some fun with Kent’s inadequacies as a dauber (the depiction in the King’s Gallery at Kensington Palace of Ulysses’s escape from Polyphemus by hiding under the belly of a giant ram ended up with ‘Ulysses walking furtively beside a quite small sheep’), he concedes that Kent achieved a rare honour for a Protestant painter by executing a centrepiece ceiling in a Roman church.
The traditional tale is that young Cant was of humble origins and began his career as an apprentice coach and house painter. Mowl, a robust myth-breaker, attributes this falsehood to the bitchiness of the antiquary George Vertue. In fact, Cant senior was a prosperous joiner and, as Mowl points out, the son was ‘much more in command of his own direction than Vertue chose to imply’.
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