1. William Kent began his career as a painter, and became Principal Painter in Ordinary or court painter, but his real talent was for design in various media.
13 Facts About William Kent
1. 2.
William Kent complemented his houses and gardens with stately furniture for major buildings including Hampton Court Palace, Chiswick House, Devonshire House and Rousham.
3.
William Kent's parents were William and Esther Cant.
4.
William Kent's career began as a sign and coach painter, and he was encouraged to study art, design and architecture by his employer.
5.
William Kent met several important figures including Thomas Coke, later 1st Earl of Leicester, with whom he toured Northern Italy in the summer of 1714, and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Rome, for whom he apparently painted some pictures, though no records survive.
6.
William Kent left Rome for the last time in the autumn of 1719, met Lord Burlington briefly at Genoa, William Kent journeying on to Paris, where Lord Burlington later joined him for the final journey back to England before the end of the year.
7.
William Kent started practising as an architect relatively late in life, in the 1730s.
8.
William Kent is remembered as an architect of the revived Palladian style in England.
9.
William Kent could provide sympathetic Gothic designs, free of serious antiquarian tendencies, when the context called; he worked on the Gothic screens in Westminster Hall and Gloucester Cathedral.
10.
William Kent worked on the house at 22 Arlington Street in St James's, a district of the City of Westminster in central London from 1743, when it was commissioned by the newly elevated Prime Minister, Henry Pelham.
11.
William Kent's projects included Chiswick House, Stowe, Buckinghamshire, from about 1730 onwards, designs for Alexander Pope's villa garden at Twickenham, for Queen Caroline at Richmond, and notably at Rousham House, Oxfordshire, where he created a sequence of Arcadian set-pieces punctuated with temples, cascades, grottoes, Palladian bridges and exedra, opening the field for the larger scale achievements of Capability Brown in the following generation.
12.
At the latter, William Kent elaborated on Bridgeman's 1720s design for the property, adding walls and arches to catch the viewer's eye.
13.
At Stowe, William Kent used his Italian experience, particularly with the Palladian Bridge.