‘Our Great Master Kent’ and the Design of Holkham Hall: A Reassessment

Abstract

Few questions have more exercised historians of eighteenth-century British architecture over several generations than that of the authorship of the design of Holkham Hall in Norfolk. The house, built between 1734 and 1765, is the quintessential domestic example of English Palladianism at its most Neoclassically extreme. Almost every feature of Holkham's exterior elevations replicates motifs to be found in Antiquity, transmitted through Andrea Palladio or other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, whilst inside not a single painted god, hero or saint complicates the clearly defined surfaces of the damasked walls or coffered ceilings. As a result, Holkham is a building of high international importance since, as John Summerson put it in describing the roots of later eighteenth-century Neoclassicism, it was in earlier eighteenth-century England that ‘the first categorical revolt against the Baroque and the first architectural statements of the new attitude are to be observed’.