The Age Of Rococo - England - Part 3

Between the years of 1715 and 1724, the architect Colen Campbell, who died in 1729, set up the architectural models on which the whole of the new Palladianism in England was to depend. He illustrated these designs in Vitruvius Britannicus, named after the classical scholar who had been Palladio's own inspiration.

William Kent (1686 - 1748) was heavily influenced by the styles of Palladio, Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren and, subsequently, Campbell. An allegorical painter, he was sent to Italy in 1709 by a group of friends and admirers to study art. On his return ten years later, he found a passionate and constant patronage in the support of the artistically talented Richard, third earl of Burlington, known as 'The Apollo of the Arts'.

Together they redesigned the fronts of the Treasury Buildings in Whitehall, and Burlington house. Horse Guards was Kent's own creation. He combined the talents of painter, architect, interior decorator and landscape gardener, and in the latter role his work was seen in the gardens of several great houses, drawing on an unusually natural style which contrasted dramatically with the lavishly ornamental flavour of much of his handmade furniture and room settings. So well did he succeed in developing the natural attributes of these gardens that the critic Walpole - he of the 'immeasurably ponderous' jibe - was moved to describe Kent as the 'Father of Modern Gardening'.

It was little wonder therefore that when turning to furniture, a man of such all-embracing talents as Kent's should design it as part of the unified scheme in a house. His furniture designs ushered in the day when architecture and furniture joined hands.
His authority dominated public taste and his name was law in matters of design ranging from tables and chairs, mirrors and frames to the dresses that people wore when they used his furniture and his rooms. The child of fashion-conscious parents would sleep in a cradle based on a Kent design, and if there is no record of Kent's having designed a gravestone or a catafalque there can be no doubt that such churchyard monuments of this time frequently owed their form to the architectural principles which he embraced in stone and wood. His writ even extended to Britain's waterways, where his work was seen in the design of barges.

Florid or pompous, depending on your point of view, Kent's fitted and non fitted furniture revelled in ornamentation. It was furniture for the rich. Cabriole legs were embellished with animal details such as lion, eagle, owl and human masks, claw and ball feet and eagles' talons. Foliated scrolls, lion manes, rocks and shells, satyrs and other mythological beasts - these were all in his vocabulary of design, and were dominant architectural pediments, columns and statuary.

Such magnificence often demanded the final touch of opulence supplied by gilding, and this was never stinted by Kent and his confreres. Selecively borrowing from various sources and periods, he both influenced and mirrored the trends of design through many departments of domestic and ceremonial furniture, as more detailed study of these developments.