William Kent was born at Bridlington in Yorkshire in 1685. He commenced his artistic career, as a sign and coach painter and was encouraged to study art, design and architecture by his employer. A group of Yorkshire gentlemen sent Kent for a period of study in Rome, where he met Thomas Coke, later 1st Earl of Leicester, with whom he toured Northern Italy in the summer of 1714 (a tour that led Kent to an appreciation of the architectural style of Andrea Palladio’s palaces in Vicenza), and Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, who travelled back to England with him in 1719. Kent is said to have earned his living in Italy by buying up paintings and selling them to the English aristocracy as house furnishings. As a painter, Kent displaced Sir James Thornhill in decorating the new state rooms at Kensington Palace, London; for Burlington, he decorated Chiswick House and Burlington House. Kent is however, far better remembered as the central architect of the revived Palladian style in England. Lord Burlington gave him the task of editing The Designs of Inigo Jones with some additional designs in the Palladian/Jonesian taste by Burlington and Kent, which appeared in 1727. As he rose through the Board of Works, the royal architectural establishment, , Kent applied this style to several public buildings in London, for which Burlington’s patronage secured him the commissions: the Royal Mews at Charing Cross (1731-33, demolished in 1830), the Treasury Buildings in Whitehall (1733-37), the highly idiosyncratic Horse Guards Building in Whitehall, (designed shortly before his death and built 1750-59). These neo-antique buildings were inspired as much by the architecture of Raphael and Giulio Romano as by Palladio. In country house building, major commissions for Kent were designing the interiors of Houghton Hall (c.1725-35), built by Colen Campbell for Sir Robert Walpole, but at Holkham Hall, reckoned by many to be his greatest work, the most complete embodiment of Palladian ideals is still to be found; there Kent collaborated with Thomas Coke, the other ‘architect earl’ and had for an assistant Matthew Brettingham, whose own architecture would carry Palladian ideals into the next generation. A theatrically Baroque staircase and parade rooms in London, at 44 Berkeley Square, are also notable. His interiors were of a style similar to that which would later be continued by Robert Adam. Kent’s domed pavilions were erected at Badminton House and Euston Hall. He could provide sympathetic Gothic designs, free of antiquarian tendencies, when the context called; he worked on the Gothic screens in Westminster Hall and Gloucester Cathedral. The royal barge he designed for Frederick, Prince of Wales resides in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Kent was one of the originators of the English landscape garden, a style of ‘natural’ gardening that revolutionised the laying out of gardens and estates. His projects included 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. His all-but-lost gardens at Claremont, Surrey, have been restored recently. Yet Kent was no horticulturalist – he envisioned the landscape as a classical painting, carefully arranged to maximize the artistic effects of light, shape, and colour. It is said that he was not above planting dead trees to create the mood he required. Claremont, Stowe, and Rousham are places where their joint efforts may be viewed. Stowe and Rousham are Kent’s most famous works. At the latter, Kent elaborated on Bridgeman’s 1720s design, adding walls and arches to catch the viewer’s eye. At Stowe, Kent used his Italian experience, particularly with the Palladian bridge. At both sites Kent incorporated his naturalistic approach. Kent died on 12 April 1748. Horace Walpole offered the verdict that he: ‘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 realises painting and improves nature. Mahomet imagined an elysium, Kent created many.’