DESIGNED AND SUPPLIED BY WILLIAM KENT, CIRCA 1740

This pair of ‘Roman’ wall brackets almost certainly formed part of the William Kent (c. 1685-1748) commission for Lieutenant-General James Dormer (1679-1741), a veteran of the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns, scholar and collector of books and bronzes, at Rousham House, Oxfordshire. Between 1738 and 1741, Kent remodeled and extended the Jacobean mansion, and created ‘a masterpiece of landscape design’ in the grounds (J. Bryant, ‘From “Gusto” to Kentissime”: Kent’s designs for country houses, villas, and lodges’, ed. S. Weber, William Kent, Designing Georgian Britain, New Haven and London, 2013, p. 221). The commission was arranged through Kent’s patron, the architect-designer, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694-1753), instrumental in the refashioning of Tottenham House, Wiltshire, from 1721, and the creation of Chiswick House Villa, Middlesex, between 1727 and 1729. At Rousham, Kent kept some of the original Jacobean staircases and paneling but designed wall brackets, probably including the pair offered here, chimneypieces and furniture. One of the present wall brackets was photographed by Country Life in 1910 in the Painted Parlour (also known as the New Parlour) flanking the ‘Kentian’ chimneypiece and overmantel (‘Rousham, Oxfordshire: The seat of Mr. C. Cottrell Dormer’, Country Life, 26 February 1910, p. 314). The wall brackets were executed to display Dormer’s bronzes – Kent describing his client as ‘bronzo mad’ (Weber, op. cit., p. 222). The 1742 inventory listed twenty two bronze figures in the Painted Parlour, some of which were on wall brackets or pedestals (ibid., p. 510). Kent also designed wall brackets for the entrance hall and library (now the Great Parlour) (ibid.). The present wall brackets must have been removed from the Painted Parlour at some point for by 1946 they had been replaced by a pair of Kent double-size brackets; and yet another wall bracket model is found on the north wall of this room (C. Hussey, ‘Rousham, Oxfordshire - I’, Country Life, 17 May 1946, p. 902, fig. 5; p. 903, fig. 8).

Wall brackets were central to a Kent interior and when busts were placed upon them they accentuated the classicism of his designs (Weber, op. cit., p. 508). Kent would undoubtedly have seen such wall brackets in the Roman palace interiors he visited during his extensive Italian sojourn. A Kent design for a wall bracket for the display of a bust, c. late 1720s-1735, is in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (E.373-1986), and another similar design was featured in John Vardy’s Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. Wm. Kent (1744), plate 20. Kent designed twelve giltwood wall brackets for the Dome Room at Chiswick House, and probably another set of twelve for the Library at Chiswick (Weber, op. cit., p. 509, fig. 18.57). Carved, painted and parcel-gilt wall brackets were designed for Tottenham House, c. 1729-31, two of which are now in the V&A, (ibid., fig. 18.56; museum nos. W.1-1988, W.1A-1988). Kent also designed such wall brackets for Queen Charlotte’s Library at St. James’s Palace, as shown in Charles Wild’s watercolour for Pyne’s Royal Residences (1819) (RCIN 922168); for the sculpture gallery at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, and for the Stone Hall at Houghton Hall, Norfolk (Weber, op. cit., p. 196, fig. 8.13).