Yes; this is a striking presentment of William Kent, 1684-1748, who had many friends and many enemies. Among the enemies was William Hogarth, who hated Kent. When you visit the National Portrait Gallery, turn your gaze slightly to the left, and you will see the representation of Hogarth at his easel, painted by himself. What would Hogarth say if he could know that the portrait of his old enemy now hangs near his? Perhaps he would smile a welcome, for anger is subdued by Death the Reconciler. I return to the question: “Who was William Kent?” The legend beneath his portrait says: “Painter, sculptor, architect, and landscape gardener.” He was all these and much more--decorator, designer of furniture, man milliner, arbiter of taste, and general adviser on art and decoration to the fashionable world. Indeed, the name of William Kent flings wide the doors of the eighteenth century, which lives in all its crowded unattractiveness in Hogarth’s unapproachable pictur’d morals. Kent lives also in one of Hogarth’s satirical prints, that called “The Man of Taste, Burlington Gate,” which does not strike me as either very funny or very cruel. Our taste in satire has changed since Hogarth’s time. This same Burlington Gate or colonnade, which once stood outside Burlington House in Piccadilly, may now, I believe, be found somewhere in the wilds of Battersea Park. Let us try to draw a little nearer to Kent. The queer thing is that this man who dominated his world does not seem to have been great in any of his activities. As a painter, Hogarth said of him: “Neither England nor Italy ever produced a more contemptible dauber.” Horace Walpole remarked that his painted ceilings were as “void of merit as his portraits.” Walpole also said that “Kent was not only consulted for furniture, frames of pictures, glass, tables, chairs, &c., but for plate, for a barge, and for a cradle, and so impetuous was fashion that two great ladies prevailed on him to make designs for their birthday gowns.” Did the ladies like their birthday gowns? The petticoat of one was decorated with the columns of the five orders, the other was copper-coloured satin with ornaments of gold. I have never seen the altar-piece Kent painted for the Church of St. Clement Danes in the Strand, but I seldom pass St. Clement’s without thinking of that “contemptible performance,” as Hogarth called it. It seems to have offended many others besides Hogarth, who satirised the altar-piece in the engraving that puzzled the boy mentioned in the preceding chapter. Walpole called it a parody, a burlesque on Kent’s altar-piece. Hogarth maintained that it was neither; that it was but a “fair and honest representation of a contemptible performance.” Terrible man, Hogarth, when he was on the war-path!