Master of the picturesque
Hugh Massingberd
WILLIAM KENT: ARCHITECT, DESIGNER, OPPORTUNIST by Timothy Mowl Cape, £25, pp. 298, ISBN 0224073508 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 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’. But in suggesting that Kent’s celebrated patron, the Earl of Burlington, may have spoken with an East Riding accent (we are invited to imagine a bizarre conversation between the two of them, with Lord B beginning, ‘Oo ee, that Alexander Pope a says to aye’, and Kent responding, ‘Never i this world tha don’t say’), I think Mowl is in danger of inventing a myth of his own. Received pronunciation is not as recent as the author seems to think. For instance, Peacham, writing in 1622, ranks a ‘gracefull’ pronunciation high among the attributes of a gentleman.
Whether he spoke broad Yorkshire or not, the mysterious figure of Lord Burlington makes for a fascinating discussion. Could he have been a closet Jacobite? Mowl shows how the enthusiasm of Kent’s first mentor John Talman for ‘proto-Rococo’ was refreshingly at odds with Burlington’s prim and austere version of Palladianism. Always in a hurry, Burlington only spent one uncomfortable night in Vicenza and managed to miss the playful point of Palladio — what Mowl calls ‘a relaxed classical humanism for confident, aristocratic farmers’. If Kent had been with him — ‘to laugh, to mock and to appreciate’ — it could all have been so different. As Mowl says, it remains ‘one of the great lost opportunities in English architectural history’.
We are treated to a couple of vigorous hatchet-jobs on that ‘plausible Scot’ Colen Campbell, laird of ‘the unhappily named Boghole’, who is dismissed as ‘one of the most malign influences ever to work in English architecture’, and the diminutive Alexander Pope, ‘the most appalling scrounger and ingratiating creep’, who was ‘invariably spiteful about everyone except his immediate benefactors’. Yet Pope, ‘a virulent homophobe’, never ‘outed’ so much as a hint that Kent and Burlington had a homosexual relationship — which I had always presumed, though Kent had a shadowy theatrical mistress. Sex can be a touchy subject as Mowl discovered when addressing the Georgian Group about Horace Walpole’s affair with the 9th Earl of Lincoln and ‘a number of ladies walked out in protest’. He observes:
It was not just a matter of ‘No sex please, we’re Georgians’, but also one of ‘Let us have no sharp, realistic standards of appreciation of the true coarse tone of the period.’
To combat this genteel approach and the ‘sugary reverence for all things “Georgian” ’, Mowl sometimes strains too much for effect in his determination to be brisk, breezy and anachronistic. Charles Saatchi, Albert Speer, Tintin, Jerome K. Jerome, John Fowles’s Magus, Madame Tussaud’s and Hooray Henrys are dragged kicking (and, in the case of queens, ‘screaming’) into the knockabout narrative. Yet overall it is a rollicking read, full of witty asides (such as describing how Ronald Tree, the Anglo-American owner of Ditchley, ‘by assiduous fox-hunting, got accepted as a Conservative candidate’) and epigrams (‘genius is often no more than a talent for friendship’).
While far from a hagiography, the book opens one’s eyes afresh to Kent’s all-round genius. There are thrilling celebrations of such works as the State Bed (‘invention and good taste pushed past their barriers into high campery’) and the dramatic Stone Hall at Houghton; the pioneering Gothick of Esher Place, which predated Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill by 16 years and has never received the credit it deserves; the magnificent Marble Hall at Holkham (‘one of the most exhilaratingly beautiful internal spaces, not just in England, but in Europe’); the sexy ceiling at 44 Berkeley Square (now the Clermont Club); the near-miraculous survival of his landscape garden at Rousham (dominated, in this fruity description, by Antinous’s buttocks); and the ingenious Worcester Lodge at Badminton, ‘unquestionably the greatest park gate lodge in Britain, a triumphant exercise in a normally tame Palladian style’. On behalf of Kent’s old boss Burrell, one can only conclude, in footer parlance, that ‘the boy done well’.
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