William Kent was an ideas man – the Damien Hirst of the 18th century

How important is William Kent (1685–1748)? He’s not exactly a household name and yet this English painter and architect, apprenticed to a Hull coach-painter before he was sent to Italy (as a kind of cultural finishing school) by a group of patrons who recognised his abilities, became the chief architectural impresario and interior decorator to the early Georgian nobility. His Italian studies made him a devoted Palladian, and in partnership with his principal collaborator Lord Burlington he set about transplanting the architectural principles and beliefs of Andrea Palladio to the English countryside. He was probably a better ideas man than artist (the Damien Hirst of his day, perhaps?), but he had access to the finest craftsmen, who could execute his plans to great effect.

Horace Walpole called Kent ‘the father of modern gardening…He leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden.’ His ideas were expanded and developed by the far more famous ‘Capability’ Brown (the English do love a garden), but it was undoubtedly Kent who pioneered this attitude, as the grounds of Stowe and Rousham bear eloquent testimony. He was a designer rather than a horticulturalist, and this conceptual approach marked all his endeavours. He designed furniture and metalwork, dabbled in book illustration, theatrical design and costume, besides his principal interests in painting, sculpture and architecture. His drawings are sometimes piquant but are rarely beautiful or aesthetically first-rate — they are working drawings intended to convey his ideas, and in that they succeed.

As a conceptual artist, it is surely appropriate that a good proportion of Kent’s designs never got further than the ideas stage — and were never made real. He submitted proposals for a new Parliament building (1733–40) and for interiors in the existing House of Lords (1735–6), and designed a splendid-looking summer Royal Palace in the Anglo-Palladian style for Richmond.