William Kent: Architect, Designer, Opportunist - Hardcover

Mowl, Timothy

2.8

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780224073509: William Kent: Architect, Designer, Opportunist

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224073508 ISBN 13: 9780224073509

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2006

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A forthright look at the work of a flamboyant designer who, during the reign of George I, turned England’s philistine sense of style inside out. Kent found his true genius laying out beautiful gardens — perhaps England’s only original contribution to European design.

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About the Author:

Timothy Mowl is Reader in Architectural and Garden History at the University of Bristol. His recent publications include biographies of two eighteenth-century aesthetes: Horace Walpole (1996) and William Beckford (1998), and a polemical study, Stylistic Cold Wars, of John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner (2000). He is currently writing an historic gardens series of the English counties.

Review:

"Entertaining, provocative and stimulating... opens one's eyes afresh to Kent's all-round genius." * Spectator * "[Mowl's] accounts of actual buildings and gardens are full of subjective intensity as well as subtle observations... Engrossing." * Guardian * "Mowl has energy and cunning in spades, and he wisely takes the course of making the book more of an assessment of Kent's work and times than an attempt on his life... a glittering knockabout of a book." * Independent on Sunday * "Provocative... We tend to admire what received opinion admires, whereas Mowl's book reverses the process, and healthily advises us to 'draw back from praising past culture simply because it happened.'" * Sunday Times * "Engaging... I was reminded, above all, of Sacheverell Sitwell's evocations of the Baroque. Kent is as much a work of stylistic art. Mowl has a gift for putting his hero's concepts into prose." * Literary Review *

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