Cole & Son | Chamber Angels

The ceiling of the Presence Chamber at Kensington Palace was painted by William Kent in the seventeen-twenties, and it is an odd and rather brilliant thing: a grotesque scheme of figures and ornament arranged around a central roundel, made at the moment Kent was inventing what English decoration would look like for the next fifty years. Chamber Angels takes its structure from that ceiling and brings it down onto the walls.

The Presence Chamber was where the king received courtiers, ministers and ambassadors, and the design keeps the ceremony of that room. Figures dance through a framework of foliage; fruit hangs ripening among them, drawn from the varieties once grown in the palace Orangery. The composition is arranged in registers, as painted ceilings are, so the design has a formal order beneath its animation.

The repeat is 68.5 cm with a straight match on a 0.52 m roll, which aligns the registers cleanly across widths and keeps the horizontal bands reading properly, the one thing this design needs in order to work. It belongs in a room with some ceremony of its own: a dining room, a hall, a first-floor drawing room. Plain paint above a dado and unpatterned upholstery are the right supports.