59A King William III. (779) . . . . . Kneller.
Three-quarters length in armour, directed to the right; face turned round to the left. He wears a blue and gold sash. In the left background is a black servant, perhaps the one whose marble bust is now in this palace.
In entering this room we pass from the portion of the palace built in 1690 by Sir Christopher Wren for William and Mary, to that constructed by William Kent about 1723 for George I. The visitor has thus a good opportunity of comparing the styles and tastes of the two architects and of gauging their relative powers. Wren had been driven from his office, in 1718, by a shameful backstair intrigue; and two years afterwards, Kent, doubtless by the influence of his patron, the Earl of Burlington, was commissioned to build a set of new state rooms.
How very mediocre were his talents, the exterior of his addition to Wren’s work will, as we have already said, ever remain a palpable proof; and though for internal construction he shows less incapacity, still this room exhibits all his false ideas of pseudo-classicism—developed, as we shall see, to a most extravagant extent in the adjoining “Cube or Cupola Room.”
Examining the decoration in detail, we perceive everywhere evidences of his awkward, graceless style. The doorways, for instance, are unnecessarily lofty and gaunt, and with their heavy cumbrous architraves, flat moulded, with little light and shade, greatly impair the proportions of the room. In the tall semi-circular headed central window also, surmounted by a purposeless oak bracket—even in such details as the mouldings of the panelling and of the framing of the doors, and the flatness of the raised panels and their relative sizes to the width of the rails and “stiles,”—we detect his marked inferiority to Wren in the designing of such fittings.
The chimney-piece, which is one of Kent’s plainer and less ponderous ones, is of a choice marble, veined black and gold.
The dimensions of this room are: 32 feet 9½ inches long, 24 feet 2 inches wide, and 19 feet 2 inches high to the top of the cornice, 24 feet to the ceiling.