The Early Georgian Period covers an interval of about forty years,—from the accession of the House of Hanover in 1714 to the appearance of Chippendale’s _The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director_ in 1754. During this period, strange to say, the art of the Regency and Louis XV., though not unfelt, has not so much influence as a spurious Gothic revival, an equally spurious “Chinese” furore and a fetish worship of Palladio and Classic architecture. The commanding figures in the taste of the day were William Kent, Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, and John Talman. Kent and Talman studied in Rome under the Chevalier Luti. When the Society of Antiquaries was established in its present form in 1718, Talman was appointed its first director. He died in 1726. Kent attracted the attention of the Earl of Burlington, and from 1716 to 1748, when Kent died, he received the shelter and hospitality of the Earl’s town house. Kent’s charming personality, and the authority he assumed in art matters in consequence of his foreign training, enabled him to win a high position in fashionable circles. He soon became the arbiter of taste. Horace Walpole testifies: “He was not only consulted for furniture, as frames of pictures, glasses, tables, chairs, etc., but for plate, for a barge, for a cradle. And so impetuous was fashion that two great ladies prevailed on him to make designs for their birthday gowns. The one he dressed in a petticoat decorated with columns of the five orders; the other, like a bronze, in a copper-coloured satin with ornaments of gold.” Walpole also says: “Kent’s style predominated during his life.” Besides the numerous mansions he built for the nobility in the Classic style, he also built a “Gothic” house for Henry Pelham. Pope says: “_Must bishops, lawyers, statesmen, have the skill To build, to plan, judge paintings, what you will? Then why not Kent as well our treaties draw, Bridgman explain the gospel, Gibbs the law?_”[15] Kent was a painter, architect and general designer, and nobody has been found to oppose Hogarth’s dictum that neither England nor Italy ever produced a more contemptible dauber. Hogarth satirizes him in two of his prints: _Masquerades and Operas_ (1724), and _The Man of Taste_ (1732). In the former, the statue of Kent surmounts Burlington Gate, and supported on a lower level by the statues of Raphael and Michael Angelo; in the latter, he again towers above the same two artists over the gate (of taste), which is being whitewashed. On a scaffolding Alexander Pope’s diminutive form is wielding the brush and spattering passers-by with the whitewash. The Duke of Chandos gets most of it. The Earl of Burlington is mounting the ladder with more material.