William Kent was a distinguished and well-known architect during the eighteenth century. Not only was William an architect, he also held the titles of interior designer, furniture designer, painter, and landscape architect throughout his life. Though in all of these lines he was not equally effective, what makes Kent remarkable is that he practiced them all simultaneously, and it was his landscape architecture in which his reputation rested on (Jourdain, 1948, p. 16). William Kent introduced the Palladian style of architecture into England with the villa at the Chiswick House. Kent also initiated a naturalistic style of landscape design which can be viewed at the Chiswick House, the Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, and the Rousham House in Oxfordshire. As a landscape architect and gardener he revolutionized the layout of estates, however, he had a limited knowledge when it came to the horticulture side of it all. This is important to note, as famous as William Kent is in the history of English landscaping, one of the main difficulties with grasping the significance and extent of his designs is that most assessments of his work are actually based on architectural insertions into landscapes and not on the landscapes themselves (Weber, 2013, p. 365).
In order to understand Kent’s philosophies and his work requires knowledge of his formative years and experiences. Most sources state that what is known about William Kent’s early life is mostly speculation (Weber, 2013, p. 27). William was born in Bridlington, Yorkshire sometime during the year of 1685. The prediction is that he was born in the month of December, however, the exact date is unknown. January 1, 1686 Kent was baptized as “William Cant” and then later on changed his last name to Kent (Weber, 2013, p.13). According to Harris, “In 1693, his father, a successful joiner named William Cant, built the modest bourgeois house and furnished it with fine joinery, and from this house there emerged an extraordinary artist, who knew Italy as well as anyone, who created an architecture stylistically far in advance of anything in Europe, who transformed English garden design, and who completely changed the mode of presenting architectural designs” (Weber, 2013, p. 27). This artist was the famous William Kent. In 1697, Kent’s family circumstances were changed drastically and suddenly by the death of his mother, leaving him at age eleven and his sister at age five to be brought up by their father (Weber, 2013, p. 27). Given the circumstances that William was dealt at a very young age he mostly looked up to his tutors, other local figures of influence, and his father (Weber, 2013, p. 27).
Throughout William Kent’s career many of the things that he did gave meaning to one another. Kent definitely began his English career primarily as a painter. Therefore, Kent’s landscaping design and architecture is consistently read by commentators in terms of his painterly skills and his profession as a visual artist (Weber, 2013, p. 365). According to Horace Walpole, one of Kent’s influencers, “Kent was a painter, an architect, and the father of modern gardening. In the first character he was below mediocrity; in the second, he was a restorer of the science; in the last, an original, and the inventor of an art that realizes painting and improves nature” (Weber, 2013, p. 368). The best way to approach Kent’s landscaping is actually through his architecture. He is known for the design and decoration of his structures that he developed for insertion into different landscapes (Weber, 2013, p. 365). He occasionally would change the landscape to better accommodate his architecture, however, he was first and foremost an architect working in landscapes rather than somebody with an instinct for restructuring a complete park or garden (Weber, 2013, p. 365). William Kent’s architectural insertions into his landscapes are not only aesthetically pleasing, they offer innovation and functionalism. According to Kent, “two aspects of garden buildings are crucial: their placement within the given landscape and their impact on the spectator” (Weber, 2013, p. 369). William Kent cared only a little about precise intellectual meanings. When it came to his designs he wanted there to always be broad associations to the things that he created, and nonetheless he wanted to provoke reactions from spectators (Weber, 2013, p. 365). Kent’s skill and enjoyment was to augment individual’s experiences and stimulate visitor’s responses to their immediate surroundings (Weber, 2013, p. 365). Throughout William Kent’s career, he created around fifty-five garden buildings, ranging from hermitages, temples, pavilions, seats, arbors, bridges, platforms, and arcades.
William Kent was involved with many buildings throughout his career. A few of the buildings that he held a huge part in were the Chiswick House, the Stowe House and the Rousham House. He may not have contributed to the actual structure architecturally speaking, however, he was very involved with the interior design, furniture design, and especially the landscape design. It was in his gardens—conceived of as natural landscapes to contrast with the classical severity of his buildings—that Kent may have achieved his freest expression. He created gardens at Rousham Hall, Oxfordshire (1738–41), and Stowe House, Buckinghamshire (c. 1730), where winding paths and open vistas lead to small classical temples in informal wooded glades. In describing the revolt from formality in garden design, Horace Walpole wrote that Kent saw that “all Nature was a garden.” The informal and irregular landscaping at these sites and others, such as Pope’s Villa, Twickenham, Middlesex (for Alexander Pope; c. 1730), and Richmond Gardens, Surrey, were a marked departure from the manicured, symmetrical precision of French gardens such as those at Versailles. The English style soon crossed the Channel and had a substantial impact in France during the second half of the 18th century.
Chiswick House is a Palladian villa in Burlington Lane, Chiswick, west London. Arguably the finest remaining example of Neo-Palladian architecture in London, the house was designed by Lord Burlington, and completed in 1729. The house and gardens occupy 26.33 hectares (65.1 acres),[1] and were created mainly by architect and landscape designer William Kent, respectively. The garden is one of the earliest examples of the English landscape garden.
Rousham House (also known as Rousham Park) is a country house at Rousham in Oxfordshire, England. The house, which has been continuously in the ownership of one family, was built circa 1635 and remodelled by William Kent in the 18th century in a free Gothic style. Further alterations were carried out in the 19th century.
In 1731 William Kent was appointed[32] to work with Bridgeman, whose last designs are dated 1735 after which Kent took over as the garden designer. Kent had already created the glorious garden at Rousham House, and he and Gibbs built temples, bridges, and other garden structures. Kent's masterpiece at Stowe is the Elysian Fields with its Temple of Ancient Virtue that looks across to his Temple of British Worthies. Kent's architectural work was in the newly fashionable Palladian style.
Claremont Landscape Garden, just outside Esher, Surrey, England, is one of the earliest surviving gardens of its kind of landscape design, the English Landscape Garden — still featuring its original 18th-century layout. The garden is Grade I listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. Work on the gardens began around 1715 and by 1727 they were described as "the noblest of any in Europe". Within the grounds, overlooking the lake, is an unusual turfed amphitheatre, which used to form the centrepiece of an annual event called the Claremont Fête champêtre. Hundreds of visitors descended on Claremont, most in costume (each year has a different theme) to enjoy four days of music, theatre and fireworks.
References
Harwood, B., May, B., Sherman, C. (2012). Architecture and Interior Design: An integrated history to the present. Pearson Education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall
Jourdain, M. (1948). The work of William Kent. Great Britain, UK: Billing and Sons Ltd., Guildford and Esher.
Kent, E. T. (1950). William Kent, independent; a biography. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002675265;view =plaintext;seq=456;page=root;size=100;orient=0
Weber, S. (2013). William Kent: designing Georgian Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.