GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



Kent that " Jack-of- all-trades " who was the Earl's pet artist 

 to be a persona grata with Lord Burlington. In two early plates, 

 " The Taste of the Town " and " The Man of Taste," or " Burling- 

 ton Gate," he had burlesqued Burlington's favourites, Kent and 

 Pope, representing Kent as perched aloft on the summit of the gate, 

 with Michael Angelo and Raphael for supporters, while little Mr. 

 Pope, on a scaffolding, is whitewashing the gate and bespattering the 

 people passing below, among them Lord Chandos, whom the poet, 

 in a letter to Lord Burlington, had lampooned. Nor did Hogarth 

 spare the Earl himself, for he makes him bring the whitewash ! 

 But this lively raillery was as nothing compared with the contempt 

 that he had contrived to pour upon the unlucky Kent in the 

 matter of an altar-piece for St. Clement's Danes, which Kent's 

 ignorance of his ow r n limitations had induced him to execute. It 

 was so execrably bad, that to satisfy the parishioners, Bishop Gibson 

 had ordered its removal. But Hogarth held it up to worse derision, 

 by publishing a print thereof, purporting to be " exactly engraved ' : 

 from it. Nor was this unfair ; Hogarth, uncompromisingly sincere 

 himself (though he, too, did not always recognize his own limita- 

 tions witness his " Pool of Bethesda " and " Sigismunda "), was 

 intolerant of charlatans, and pretenders of all sorts. 



Part of his strong aversion to Kent may have arisen from his 

 championship of his father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill, whom, in 

 his own individual line, Kent had attempted to rival. And this 

 painter of bad portraits, this high priest of the Baroque, who tried 

 his hand at everything, from the decoration of a ceiling to the 

 designing of a lady's dress, no doubt really deserved the true artist's 

 scorn. He was a passable architect, but his best efforts in archi- 

 tecture seem to have been inspired and directed by the superior 

 taste of his patron ; he was a good planner of fine gardens indeed, 

 a past-master in the art of landscape-gardening ; but that was an 

 art of which the painter of city scenes, the resident in Leicester 

 Fields, knew nought. 



So far as I am aware, no writer on Hogarth or on Chiswick, with 

 one exception and he was under the mistaken impression that 

 Kent was still resident at Chiswick House when Hogarth came 

 to the cottage has remarked on his rather singular choice of a 

 country house situated at the very gates of the nobleman ridiculed 

 by him in " Burlington Gate," the patron of the man who had been 



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