Thomas Chippendale

Thomas Chippendale (baptized June 5, 1718, Otley, Yorkshire, England—buried November 13, 1779, London) was one of the leading cabinetmakers of 18th-century England and one of the most perplexing figures in the history of furniture. His name is synonymous with the Anglicized Rococo style.

Nothing is known of Chippendale’s early life until his marriage to Catherine Redshaw in London in 1748. In 1753 he moved to St. Martin’s Lane, where he maintained his showrooms, workshops, and home for the rest of his life. In 1754 he published his celebrated Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. This work was the most important collection of furniture designs theretofore published in England, illustrating almost every type of mid-18th-century domestic furniture. The first and second (1755) editions contained 160 plates, and the third edition (published in weekly parts, 1759–62) had 200. The designs largely were Chippendale’s improvements on the fashionable furniture styles and designs of the time.

Chippendale was elected to the Society of Arts in 1759 but declined reelection in the following year. Meanwhile he had become a partner with James Rannie, apparently an upholsterer, who died in 1766. Chippendale continued the business alone until he took Thomas Haig, Rannie’s former clerk, into partnership in 1771. Chippendale’s first wife died in 1772, and he married Elizabeth Davis in 1777. He died of tuberculosis two years later.

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Although head of an important firm, Chippendale was not the greatest of all English furniture makers, and his exaggerated posthumous reputation is attributable largely to the Director. A 20th-century scholarly investigation revealed him as essentially a collector and extremely talented modifier of already existing styles, notably Rococo, which is characteristically used in Chippendale’s many designs for mahogany chairs with intricately pierced slats and for elaborately carved case furniture. Other designs in the Director show the Rococo adaptations of Chinese and Gothic styles, some to be carved in softwood and gilded or japanned (an East Asian process, similar to lacquering). Though the plates in the Director are signed by Chippendale, it is now accepted that some were by other designers in the Rococo style, notably Henry Copland, who had published designs earlier, and Matthias Lock, whom Chippendale had hired to provide special designs for clients.

Chippendale’s name is given indiscriminately to great quantities of mid-18th-century furniture, but, in fact, only comparatively few pieces can be assigned with certainty to his workshop. Once established as head of a large firm, he did not make furniture himself. Even pieces that resemble designs in the Director cannot be attributed to his shop without further evidence, for the designs were available to contemporary cabinetmakers, some of whose names appear in the original list of subscribers. Where a piece corresponds to a Director plate and where the original owner was a subscriber to the Director or is known to have employed Chippendale, a tentative attribution may be made, such as the extraordinary bedroom suite at Badminton House, Gloucestershire, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Cabinetmakers in the American colonies borrowed heavily from the Director.

From the 1760s onward, influenced by the great English designer Robert Adam, Chippendale adopted the new Neoclassical style. Existing bills for work carried out by his firm at Nostell Priory and Harewood House, Yorkshire, during this final phase of his career identify the fine Neoclassical mahogany and marquetried satinwood furniture with which he supplied these houses and show that, as cabinetmakers and upholsterers, his firm undertook all branches of interior decoration. His cornice for a Venetian window, sofas, and dressing tables canopied with overdrapes are characteristic of the upholsterer’s art in the mid-18th century. The superb satinwood and inlaid commodes (possibly designed by his son Thomas Chippendale II) and other furniture at Harewood House are masterpieces of the cabinetmaker’s craft, upon which his reputation may safely rest.