Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (13 page)

So it was that three of London’s most prominent painters came to see the bizarrely splendid and half-finished Cupola Room. High above them, William Kent was slowly transforming the plain plaster into a marvellously deceptive montage of marble and
golden chrysanthemums, his tricks with perspective turning the room into a space seemingly twice as tall.

Kent and his assistants worked from a tall wooden scaffold tower, and also had a smaller, movable ‘framed’ scaffold that could run from place to place upon wheels. Kent was quite comfortable at heights up to forty precarious feet above the ground.
⁴⁹

His equipment included his brushes (hog’s bristle and camel hair), his scraping or pallet knives, the earthen pots holding his colours, and cans of oil for thinning. His assistants Robert Clerece and Franciscus de Valentia were busy with the pestle and the heavy square grinding stone, working the pigments into the favoured medium of nut oil. Ready-mixed paint was not yet widely available for sale.

Kent had to paint each patch over and over again because oil-based paint rarely produces an even hue.
⁵⁰
He was creating a design – roughly inspired by Thornhill’s earlier scheme – of
trompe l’oeil
recessed octagons, each one painted complete with shadows. The backdrop was a luxuriantly veined imitation marble. In the centre was a great star of the Order of the Garter; at each corner were bushels of the flowing feathers of the Prince of Wales, a nod from George I to his son.

Although Kent’s scheme was based on Thornhill’s original proposal, this was certainly not the kind of baroque, figure-based painting at which Sir James excelled. At his glorious Painted Hall in Greenwich, princes and princesses are treated like deities, seated amidst angels, clouds and a cornucopia of gold. At Kensington Palace, Kent was using paint to emulate architecture, and to create the spectacular but solid effect of a Roman palace. There was no complicated iconographic message to puzzle out here. At this moment, wall art was becoming less of a lesson about people or ideas, and the concept of the ‘interior decorator’ as opposed to the artist was being born.

But this would not happen without birth pangs.

On 22 May, the painters on the inspection committee made their report, and they were not impressed. ‘The perspective is not
just,’ they complained, and the ‘ornaments … not done as such a place requires’. Mr Nesbitt thought he’d seen ‘very few worse’ pieces of work; Mr Rambour thought it ‘not so much as tolerably well performed’.

Worse still for Kent was an accusation that he’d defrauded the king by using substandard materials. Mr Van der Vaart and Mr Rambour thought he hadn’t used ‘true ultramarine’ because ‘it does not look fine enough’. And Alexander Nesbitt condemned unequivocally: in his opinion Kent had used ‘nothing but [inexpensive] Prussian Blue’.
⁵¹

While other blue paints came from cornflowers, copper or glass, Kent, of course, was contractually obliged to use ultramarine, the expensive blue made from lapis lazuli. For centuries it had been the most highly prized pigment of all, azure in hue, rich, deep, long-lasting and made from precious stone transported thousands of miles from the mines of Afghanistan. The painter Edward Norgate (d.1650) gives directions for the protracted process of preparing ultramarine. First you grind the mineral and mix it into a paste. Then you

The skill of the paint-maker was akin to that of the druggist or the cook, requiring exotic ingredients such as East Indian yellow or indigo from the West Indies. Crushed cochineal beetles went into carmine red, and pieces of ancient Egyptian mummies were a prized ingredient for brown.
⁵³

Even the cheap Prussian blue – proposed but rejected for the Cupola Room – was a peculiar product only available since 1710. It had been discovered by accident when an alchemist from Berlin threw away some waste potash (a compound containing potassium produced from wood ashes). A colleague mixed it accidentally with
some alkali, thereby producing a new, robust, deep blue: less expensive than ultramarine, but not quite as good.
⁵⁴

The advisory committee’s negative report destroyed SurveyorGeneral Sir Thomas Hewett’s peace of mind. He thought that Kent’s work had been ‘perfectly well executed’ and guessed that jealousy had fired up all the ‘quacks’, ‘knaves’ and ‘fools’ of the artistic world. He was deeply discouraged, and thought it ‘impossible to have anything good’ with such wrong-headed mules for colleagues.
⁵⁵

And the king, in his turn, was rumoured to be ‘not a bit content’ with Sir Thomas Hewett.

Surely, with these rumours of royal displeasure, Kent would now get his comeuppance for stealing the commission from Thornhill? With reports like these being bandied about, he must have been aware that he was in danger of getting the sack.

*

But whether it was due to inertia, disagreement or string-pulling by Kent’s friends, there was no official response to the inspection committee’s report. So he continued painting. By July, the king was said to be ‘much pleased with Kensington, and the easy way of living he is fallen into there’.
⁵⁶
Now officially, if not emotionally, reconciled with his son, the king and little princesses received stiff and sticky Sunday visits from Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline.
⁵⁷

By August, Kent had finished the Cupola Room, and began to feel anxious and ‘uneasy for want of his money’.
⁵⁸
In response to his prodding for payment, he discovered nothing but further dispute at the Office of the King’s Works. So he began to kick up a fuss about the officials’ procrastination. On 22 August 1722, he invaded the board’s actual meeting to make a scene ‘in relation to his money’.
⁵⁹
And he had friends working on his behalf elsewhere. After that particular meeting was adjourned without a decision, a letter arrived from the Treasury, commanding the Board of Works that Kent must be paid ‘immediately without any further exceptions or delays whatsoever’.
⁶⁰

Happy-go-lucky and haphazard as he was, Kent was clearly ‘sailing thro’ the ways of life well befriended’.
⁶¹
He was beginning to prove the truth of a later judgement of his character: that he was ‘bold and opinionative enough to dare to dictate, and born with a genius’.
⁶²

He would also prove to be vindicated in the matter of materials. Conservation work to the Cupola Room ceiling in the twentieth century established that Kent really had used the expensive ultramarine, not the cheaper Prussian blue.

*

Paid at last, Kent continued gaily to work through the other rooms at Kensington. In 1724, he began the Presence Chamber and Council Chamber. The king’s Gallery and Great and Little Closets were soon under way.

William Kent’s sketch for the drawing-room ceiling, Kensington Palace. In the oval are Jupiter and Semele, the human lover Jupiter accidentally killed with his Olympian thunder-flashes

 

Yet the finished Cupola Room continued to displease London’s
cognoscenti
.
They found it ‘a terrible glaring show, & truly gothic’. The connoisseur George Vertue thought its poor quality could be explained by the endless ‘private piques’ and quarrels among the members of the Board of Works.
⁶³

Undeterred by all the criticism, though, the king seemed to be serenely happy with progress on his palace. In addition to the decoration indoors, a tiger was acquired for the palace menagerie, an ‘iron den’ constructed for its accommodation, the ‘snailery, and a place for breeding tortoises’ were completed and the palace’s kitchens were rebuilt.
⁶⁴
Kensington was nearly ready for its golden days as the Hanoverian kings’ beloved summer residence. George I now declared that he liked Kensington ‘mightily’ and was ‘more at ease and tranquillity than ever before in England’.
⁶⁵

Hogarth calls Kent by the shortest word for the female genitalia. The statue of Kent, standing over the entrance to the ‘Academy of Arts’, is labelled ‘KNT’

 

Among the artists of London, however, the quarrel ground on, and Thornhill refused to accept any commission for less than ‘the
same price each picture as Mr Kent had’.
⁶⁶
The engraver William Hogarth struck back on behalf of Thornhill and the old guard. He ridiculed Kent’s pretensions in a series of caricatures. The most offensive of them showed the statue of a painter carved with the letters ‘KNT’, combining a reference to Kent himself with the shortest word for the female genitalia.

Despite his lucrative work at Kensington and his continued royal favour, these rude caricatures ‘touch’t Mr Kent and diverted the town’.
⁶⁷
The quarrel seemed set to run and run, and it remained to be seen whether Kent could pay Hogarth back for his teasing.

*

In 1725, setting aside his irritation, Kent had begun the greatest and most successful of his works at the palace. In July, he was ‘so busy about the staircase’ at Kensington that he had no time for any other commissions.
⁶⁸
This time he was creating an undoubted masterpiece: the mural masquerade in which the servants would show their faces to the world.

One by one, individuals from the lower ranks of the royal household were taking their painted places within a magnificent architectural setting, created in oils upon canvas covering the staircase walls.

The idea of painted people looking through painted windows, or of a painted sky glimpsed over fictitious rooftops, wasn’t new. Kent’s most likely source of inspiration was the Sala dei Corazzieri at the Quirinal Palace in Rome, from the early seventeenth century. There an exotically dressed crowd of people look between painted pillars down into the room below.
⁶⁹
Kent’s innovation was to make it all more realistic. His Kensington arcade was inhabited by genuine court servants, at a reasonable scale and in their normal clothes.

The lower walls and landing of Kent’s staircase are decorated with monumental and sombre suits of armour, trophies, statues, seahorses, an impassive head of Britannia and a blank-eyed Roman warrior, all painted in shades of grey and gloom.
(Additionally, it would be many years before the ‘lanterns on the great staircase’ were finally ‘fixed in a proper manner’.
⁷⁰
)

As you ascend the stairs you gradually come level, and enter into eye contact, with the portraits of the servants. The perspective begins to work as you rise to the proper vantage point on the upper landing. The figure of Diana, painted on this landing, was copied from a real antique statue.
⁷¹

The people boldly eyeing you as you climb are not courtiers of the highest rank. Lord Chesterfield understood that those below stairs wielded great power, and that a history of the court should concentrate on the servants as well as the great: