Regarded by some as the equal of Inigo Jones, Vanbrugh or Capability Brown, William Kent (1685-1748) was an accomplished and influential designer whose landscape gardens, furniture, architecture, paintings, sculpture and book illustrations helped form eighteenth-century taste in England, Ireland, America and beyond. This collection of scholarly essays on his various talents is lavishly illustrated, beautifully produced and a lasting pleasure to read.Born of humble parents in Yorkshire, Kent lived, studied and worked in Italy for 10 years, including a period painting devotional pictures in churches, and the influence of Italian neoclassicism, is clear in his own style, an English Palladianism which verges sometimes on pastiche. He also worked in Baroque, Rococo and Gothic styles. Much of h