Education
Kent was encouraged to study art, design and architecture by his employer.
Apprenticed to a coach-painter, his ambition soon led him to London, where he began life as a portrait and historical painter.
Kent was encouraged to study art, design and architecture by his employer.
Apprenticed to a coach-painter, his ambition soon led him to London, where he began life as a portrait and historical painter.
He was taken up by the nobility early in his career, and travelled to Rome (from 1709), where he made the acquaintance of many English grandees, including Lord Burlington, whose protégé he became.
Kent edited the Designs of Inigo Jones with some Additional Designs (1727), the ‘additions’ being by Burlington and himself, and drawn by Flitcroft.
Burlington got his man into the Office of Works in 1726, and in 1735 Kent became Master-Mason and Deputy Surveyor.
Kent did not practise as an architect until the 1730s, at a time when the second Palladian Revival was in full swing, but he was not stylistically restricted, for some of his schemes of interior decorations (and his furniture-designs) are sumptuous, looking back towards the Baroque he had admired in Italy: 22 Arlington Street (1741) and 44 Berkeley Square (1742–4—with a noble staircase), both in London, contained some of his most successful interiors.
Of considerable significance in the history of Palladianism was Holkham Hall, Norfolk (1734–65), for which M. Brettingham was the executive architect.
Holkham is the most splendid Palladian house in England (Burlington had a hand in its design): its lavish marble apsidal entrance-hall (an amalgam of a Roman basilica and a Vitruvian Egyptian Hall), with a coffered ceiling and a magnificent stair leading to the piano-nobile level, is one of the grandest rooms of the period.
Kent was an important figure in garden-history, for he was in the vanguard of the revolution against the formal gardens of the C17, and combined Palladian architecture with the contrived ‘naturalness’ of the park.
He created landscapes that were comparable to the pictures of Claude or Poussin (as at Rousham, Oxon.
He also designed in the Gothick style, notably the choir-screen, Gloucester Cathedral (1741—destroyed), and the pulpit at York Minster (1741—burned, 1829), published by John Vardy (1744), which may have been the source of some of the Gothick elements in St John's Church, Shobdon, Herefs.
(1746–56).
Quotes from others about the person
Horace Walpole: English "painter, architect, and the father of modern gardening".