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From: "Architexturez." <admin-in@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2006 13:34:04 +0530
CAPE £25 £22.50 (P&P FREE) 08700 798 897
William Kent: architect, designer, opportunist by Timothy Mowl
An English Michelangelo - damn him!
By Tim Martin
Published: 04 June 2006
According to Timothy Mowl, the early 18th century was a pretty dismal
time: an era of artistic impoverishment and cultural stasis that has
somehow "managed to pass itself off, retrospectively, as the Age of
Reason, despite its gentry wearing powdered white wigs, enjoying heroic
couplets and hailing mediocre portrait painters as great artists". Its
most interesting figure was William Kent, an architect, interior
decorator, garden designer and painter who rose from Yorkshire obscurity
to a position of the most exalted influence upon English tastes.
Responsible along the way for the fashionable architectural abortion of
"Burlingtonian fake-Palladian", Kent ended his days in an access of
creativity, designing interiors that were as close to Rococo as the
country ever came and drawing up plans for that most exportable of
commodities, the "English Garden".
cont'd....
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article624118.ece