Category: Kristine Hughes

Whilst in Manhattan recently, I was fortunate enough to be able to take in the current Exhibition at the Bard Gallery – William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, which will move to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from March 22 to July 13, 2014.

The Exhibition contains nearly 200 examples of Kent’s elaborate drawings for architecture, gardens, and sculpture, along with furniture, silver, paintings, illustrated books and new documentary films. As most of his best-known surviving works are in Britain’s great country houses, the exhibition is rich in loans from private as well as public collections.

As the Exhibition website tells us: “Kent devised a style that catered to the Grand Tour alumni, recreating the splendors of Roman palazzi. A jovial house guest of his patrons, ‘Kentino’ (as he was affectionately known) and his creations reminded them of the best days of their lives, before they returned, inherited, and dutifully managed their old family estates.” Kent’s notebooks and drawings kept during his own time in Italy form a part of the current Exhibition and it was fascinating to see these items, written in his own centuries ago, up close.

You may recall a recent post on this blog on Devonshire House in London and, if so, you’ll know how delighted I was to find items from the House included in the Kent Exhibition.

Lord Burlington is the best- known today of several patrons who embraced Kent’s design ideals and Kent lived in his London townhouse, Burlington House (today the home of the Royal Academy) for most of his life and was also, in effect, artist-in-residence at Burlington’s new Italianate villa at Chiswick.

Armchair for Devonshire House William Kent. Armchair for Devonshire House William Kent 1733-40. Carved gilt wood, modern upholstery.

Of Kent’s public works, the exhibition examines 10 Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, the Horse Guards at Whitehall, and the Royal Mews. One section is devoted to Holkham Hall, designed with the assistance of Lord Burlington for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, who was among Kent’s most important patrons. You can read Victoria’s post on her visit to Holkham Hall here.

There is a book that’s been published to coincide with the Exhibition entitled William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, edited by Susan Weber, and published with Yale University Press,
presents twenty-one essays by leading scholars of eighteenth-century British art and design, including Julius Bryant (co-curator), Geoffrey Beard, John Harris, John Dixon Hunt, Frank Salmon, and David Watkin. The book is richly illustrated with over 600 color images, including the pieces featured in the exhibition. A chronology of Kent’s projects, an exhibition checklist, and an extensive bibliography round out this scholary publication.

You can read more about the Exhibition on the Bard Graduate Center website here.

You’ll forgive me for returning to a topic on which I posted as recently as Friday, but Masterpiece Theatre is truly getting on my nerves. On Friday I touched on the fact that it seems just recently to want to remind me of the Wellington Tour at every turn. Today, I have a new gripe – the way Masterpiece Theatre treats it’s U.S. viewers like second class citizens.

I was doing a bit of gardening on Saturday. Now, before you get the wrong picture in your head, I live in Florida and so use the term “garden” loosely. Disabuse yourself of Capability Brown-like borders and vistas.

The reality, especially since I’ve been ignoring the garden of late, is more like this –

Except that it’s more overgrown. So, there I was hacking through the underbrush, being bitten rather painfully on my neck by something rather large, when it dawned on me that the fact that Masterpiece Theatre airs shows like Downton Abbey and Sherlock earlier in Britain than in the U.S. was exceedingly unfair. Why make us wait to see them when they didn’t have to? Surely our fan base is as large as theirs, or even larger. There are more of us then of them, after all.

And then I started thinking that it was additionally unfair that Britain kept all their good bits of history on their side of the pond, as well. I mean in that they are entitled. They own it all. They can do what they want with their heritage sites and stately homes and the like. But they’ve got so much of the stuff, large numbers of it going to rack and ruin at such an accelerated rate that English Heritage itself can’t keep up. Therefore, you’d think they’d pack a few of the crumblier ones up and ship them over here and therefore share the wealth, if you will. I mean, if they could FedEx the London Bridge over here, then surely a moderately sized stately pile wouldn’t be a problem? Once they arrived here, we could round up the HGTV hosts to reassemble them and then renovate and redecorate them according to historic designs. Instead of Property Brothers or Love It or List It or Income Property we could call the show The Castle Crew or even History Handyman or some such. Or we could get the neighbors in to redo the place for the new owners to the designs of Adams or Ackermann or Inigo Jones and then have a big reveal at the end of each episode. Think of the ratings.

And whilst we’re at it, why don’t they send a few Royals over here to head our government? Oh, I know the Royals no longer actually run the British government, but then there aren’t that many politicians over here actually running the government either. Instead of our having to deal with cracked out mayors and sniping senators, there would at least be entertainment value in seeing what hats the Royals wore while at the same time they might drum up some business for American fashion houses. And really, the more we have to deal with the healthcare fiasco in this country, the more National Health seems like a jolly good idea.

And so my mind went, until I became aware of the bite I’d received on my neck, which was beginning to itch. It was a large bite. The welt it left was about the size of a rather large grape. It was so large that it made me wonder just what the deuce had bitten me, since I hadn’t gotten a look at it. I doubt it was a brown recluse spider since I’m still alive and hope it wasn’t one of those devilish insects that lays eggs beneath the skin of their victims. I also hope I’m still alive by the time Season 3 of Sherlock finally airs here on January 19th.