Wendell Garrett
Furniture Design Books
The fourth and fifth decades of the 18th Century saw the publication of a number of books of engraved furniture designs. At first, these designs were incorporated in pattern books produced by architects, builders and housewrights and not by craftsmen. The relatively few furniture plates which were shown were part of general decorative schemes and were of varied merit. One of the earliest books of this kind was Batty and Thomas Langley’s City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs, published in 1740. It was mainly concerned with architecture, but included designs for side tables with marble tops, table frames, a chest of drawers, a dressing table and several bookcases. In most of these pieces, the baroque style of the William Kent school was clearly evident.
The pioneer of Rococo in England was Matthias Lock, who produced several design books between 1740 and 1752. In this latter year, he published A New Book of Ornaments in collaboration with Henry Copland, in which the Rococo style was applied to carvers’ pieces, notably mirrors, pier tables, clockcases, stands and wall lights. (Both Lock and Copland were later employed by Thomas Chippendale on the plates for his Director, published in 1754.) In 1769, two new books of Lock’s designs appeared: A New Book of Pier Frames and A New Book of Foliage.
Successive waves of interest in Chinese decoration and ornament affected the fashionable Georgian world. In France, Oriental and Rococo motifs were closely associated and when the Rococo style reached England in the middle years of the 18th Century, it kindled interest in Chinese ornament and works of art and this affected the design of furniture. The Chinese taste was first promoted by the designer and engraver Mathias Darly in a work entitled A New Book of Chinese, Gothic and Modern Chairs (1750-51), an indifferent performance, but the first English pattern book specifically concerned with chairs. (Darly engraved most of the plates for Chippendale’s Director and later for The Universal System of Household Furniture, published in 1759-62 by Ince and Mayhew.)
A landmark was reached in furniture history with the publication of Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director in 1754, for it was the first pattern book to be devoted entirely to furniture and the first to be published by a cabinetmaker. A second edition (virtually a reprint) appeared in 1755, and a third in 1762. It was subsequently followed by a number of similar publications. These have made Chippendale’s name a household word, and practically synonymous with the Rococo style of the mid-century.
Thomas Chippendale, the elder, was baptized at a rural church in Yorkshire, on June 5, 1718 and died in 1779. He is buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London. It is not known when he first came to London, but in 1745, he was living in Conduit Court, Long Acre, and in 7152, at Somerset or Northumberland Court in the Strand. He moved to 60 St. Martin’s Lane in 1753 or ’54, and may have taken into partnership James Rannie, a cabinetmaker. Rannie died in 1766. Chippendale continued the business alone until 1771, when Thomas Haig joined the firm when then became Chippendale, Haig and Company. After Chippendale’s death, the business was carried on by his eldest son, Thomas Chippendale, the younger (1749-1822), who continued the business of Chippendale, Haig and Company. Haig withdrew from the firm in 1796 and the younger Chippendale was made bankrupt in 1804.
Even though Thomas Chippendale’s signature appeared on the plates of the Director, it seems that he cannot claim sole credit for all the designs, for it is known that he employed Lock and Copland as his “ghosts” to help him. He must, however, be given his fair share of praise for both his keen business sense in turning to good account the growing popularity of the Rococo style and for applying it to all kinds of furniture, including household articles for ordinary domestic use. As a practical craftsman, his knowledge and experience must have been of the greatest value to draughtsmen in his employ. He adapted the French mode into an unmistakable English version and did not merely imitate it. In the Director, the Chinese and Gothic styles were exploited to a secondary degree; the title page of the third edition omitted reference to these styles, though some of their plates were retained. It is through the success of his book that the reputation of Chippendale ahs overshadowed those of his rivals. His firm was certainly a celebrated one, with a rich and influential clientele, but, so far as is known, he did not supply any furniture to the royal household. It is noteworthy that the best work of his firm was done, not in the Director styles, but in the neo-classical style, which superseded the Rococo in the 1760s.
Few students of furniture history would quarrel with the statement that the half century or so, after 1760, marked the zenith of English and colonial American cabinet-making. During this period, the closest harmony existed between the work of the architect and that of the furniture maker; the skill of the craftsmen was at its highest. English furniture in the neo-classical style set a European fashion and equaled in technique the best work of the great French cabinetmakers, two facts which give point to George Hepplewhite’s statement in The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide, published in 1788, that “English taste and workmanship have, of late years, been much sought for by surrounding nations.”
It is well to emphasize the predominant position of London, not only in the size of the market and the physical output of furniture (the capital’s population was a million at the census of 1811, when Manchester’s, then the next largest city, was some 130,000), but also in its leadership in styles and techniques. There were, of curse, plenty of excellent craftsmen in the main provincial towns of England and the seaports of the North American colonies, but they looked to the capital for the latest furniture fashions. One of the chief functions of the many design books which emanated from London in this period, was to spread these new ideas. To quote Hepplewhite again, “…to many of our own Countrymen and Artizans (sic) whose distance from the Metropolis makes even an imperfect knowledge of its improvements acquired with much trouble and expense.”
For a quarter of a century after 1760, the great name in furniture design was Robert Adam (1708-1792). In place of the medley of styles of the early Chippendale period (Rococo, gothic and Chinese), Adam designed in the neo-classical style; His furniture was an essential part of his scheme of treating the decoration of a house, inside and out, as a harmonious whole. In his own words, in the preface to his Works in Architecture, 1773, Adam said he was greatly inspired by the “beautiful light style of ornament used by the ancient Romans in the decoration of their palaces, baths and villas.” He stressed the importance of delicacy and straight lines.
What really popularized the new mode was Hepplewhite’s Guide of 1788, published two yars after the author’s death. With nearly 300 designs, covering all kinds of furniture, it illustrated admirably how the application of Adam’s principles, “the latest or most prevailing fashion” could “unite elegance and utility, and blend the useful with the agreeable.” Designs similar to Hepplewhite’s appeared in the Cabinet-Makers’ London Book of Prices, also published in 1788; many of the plates for this book had been designed by Thomas shearer who re-issued them under his own name as Designs for Household Furniture, in the same year.
The changes at the end of the 18th century wee interpreted in Thomas Sheraton’s famous Drawing Book, published in parts between 1791 and 1794. It reflected the emphasis on light and delicate furniture, the making of which required a very high standard of skill from the craftsmen; in fact, the furniture of this particular period can properly be considered among the most technically perfect ever made in England and the New Republic. Sheraton also published The Cabinet Dictionary, in 1803, which contains many useful and instructive definitions, as well as practical information about the technique of cabinet- and chairmaking. Only about a quarter of his last work, The Cabinet-Maker, Upholsterer and General Artists’ Encyclopedia appeared just before his death (in poverty) in 1806.
No pieces of furniture have ever been traced to Sheraton, and it is doubtful whether he ever had a workshop; his trade card announced that he taught perspective, architecture and ornaments, and made designs for cabinet makers, and sold “all kinds of Drawing Books.” Adam Black, the founder of a London publishing house and a fellow lodger with Sheraton in a house at Broad Street, described him in his Memoirs as “a man of talents, and, I believe, of genuine piety. He understands the cabinet-business—I believe was bred to it; he has been and perhaps at present is, a preacher; he is a scholar, writes well; draws, in my opinion, masterly; he is an author, bookseller, stationer, and teacher.” Sheraton’s name, like that of Chippendale, is a household word and will remain so. Their fame is due to their well-advertised skill as designers and to the very convenient way in which their names can label the furniture of their period, rather than to their supremacy as craftsmen.
