2013/01/01 by Richard Hewlings · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Historical Architecture and Urbanism
paper · doi:10.1179/1752016914z.00000000023
openalex publication_date 2013/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Kenwood is famous for the Library added to the house in 1767 by Robert Adam for the 1st Earl of Mansfield (1705–93), the great lawyer; for the giant portico at its entrance; and for the stucco ornament which Adam applied to its south fac¸ade, conspicuous from Hampstead Heath. Lord Mansfield owned it for 39 years, and made other attractive alterations to the interior, but otherwise left it in the rambling form in which he found it. By contrast, his nephew and heir, the 2nd Earl of Mansfield (1727–96), who only owned it for three years and five months, transformed it into the modern country house whose appearance it still retains, by the addition of two wings projecting northwards and an office wing on the east side, which together more than doubled the floor area of the 1st Earl’s house. The 2nd Earl also engaged Humphry Repton to design improvements to the landscape setting of Kenwood, and added stables, lodges, a model farm and a dairy. These buildings are styled in the spare and ingenious geometrical manner of the 1790s, arresting in itself, and particularly so in the case of the office wing and the Dairy. Yet they have scarcely been discussed in the art-historical literature and their history has never been published. This article discusses one of them, the Dairy, considering the people who commissioned it and the architects who may (or may not) have designed it; and it describes the alterations made by the 3rd Earl (1777–1840) and 4th Earl of Mansfield (1806–98).