Now I Sit Me Down (10 page)

Chippendale

My wing chair is based on a mid-eighteenth-century model from Virginia, but Hickory calls it the Chippendale Wing Chair, a case of marketing trumping historical accuracy. The name Chippendale is popularly associated with exceptional furniture, just as Stradivarius is associated with exceptional violins. Yet, unlike Antonio Stradivari, Thomas Chippendale did not sign his work, and except in the case of specific country houses for which he is known to have provided furniture—and whose furniture has survived—it is difficult to identify a Chippendale original.
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Nevertheless, the name is used to characterize the style with which the furniture maker is associated, whether it is his work or not.

Thomas Chippendale was born in 1718 in a small town in Yorkshire. His father was a joiner and likely trained his son in the craft, although very little is known about Chippendale's youth; indeed, there is no biographical information at all concerning the first half of his life. What is known is that by the age of twenty-nine (when his marriage was recorded) he had moved to London and was the proprietor of a modest cabinetmaking shop. Somewhere along the way he learned to draw and mastered the elements of domestic design, for in addition to being a furniture maker, he appears to have been an upholsterer—as interior decorators were then called.

With the support of a wealthy Scottish backer, James Rannie, Chippendale expanded his business. He moved to fashionable St. Martin's Lane, where his neighbors were some of London's most successful cabinetmakers and upholsterers; his shop was identified by the Sign of the Chair. Rannie and Chippendale had their homes next to the shop; the workshop and lumber storage were in the rear. Chippendale prospered and employed at least twenty workers; an impressive ascent for a small-town joiner.
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Like other upholsterers, he provided his clients with a full range of home furnishings: drapes, wall hangings, wallpaper, and carpets. He decorated entire country houses for wealthy landowners—more than two dozen such commissions are documented. Chippendale also built furniture designed by others. One of his regular clients was the Scottish architect Robert Adam, London's leading decorator. Adam was known to be extremely demanding, and that he entrusted Chippendale with commissions attests to the latter's reputation.

By Adam and Chippendale's time, Baroque had given way to rococo, forms were lighter, and surfaces were richly ornamented. The cabriole leg persisted, but in an attenuated and highly modeled form. Carving reached unprecedented heights of virtuosity. In some of Chippendale's furniture, for example, complicated details that in French furniture might have been ormolu (gilded cast bronze) were actually carved wood. This required an extremely hard material. English cabinetmakers favored imported French walnut, but in the early 1700s, after a severe winter had killed off many trees and the French government banned the export of the wood, the English began to import black walnut from Virginia and mahogany from Jamaica. This produced a momentous change in chairmaking, just as the importation of Chinese furniture to Europe had done earlier. Mahogany is harder than walnut, closer and straighter in the grain, and allows greater intricacy and crispness in carving. In addition, mahogany turns a beautiful deep red as it ages. In due course, varnished mahogany became the hallmark of English furniture.

Most of what is known about Chippendale's personal life is conjecture. Because he employed many workers, and because he executed the designs of others—notably Adam—it has been suggested that Chippendale was chiefly a businessman. His biographer Christopher Gilbert disagrees, and characterizes the cabinetmaker as “a self-made man who owed his success to ambition, opportunism, unflagging hard work and outstanding creative ability.” These qualities are evident in a book that Chippendale published in 1754, just as he was launching his St. Martin's Lane enterprise.
The Gentleman and Cabinetmaker's Director
is a lavish folio volume of 160 engraved plates. The majority of the engravings are the work of Matthew Darly, an engraver and bookseller, who two years earlier had published
A New Book of Chinese, Gothic and Modern Chairs.

The title page of Chippendale's book is a combination of self-promotion—“A Large Collection of the Most Elegant and Useful Design of Household Furniture in the Gothic, Chinese and Modern Taste”—grand promises—“Calculated to improve and refine the present TASTE, and suited to the Fancy and Circumstances of Persons in all Degrees of Life”—and sly wit: a Latin quotation from Horace, “He'll make it look like child's play, although, in fact, he tortures himself to do so.”

The
Director
was available from Chippendale's shop and from booksellers in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin.
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A bound copy cost two guineas, a considerable sum. The list of more than three hundred subscribers who bought advance copies (thus financing the scheme) included cabinetmakers, upholsterers, and joiners, as well as patrons. The
Director
brought Chippendale renown, but it was much more than simply a promotional tool; it was, as the name implied, a design guide. The author explained in the preface that the dual purpose of the
Director
was to serve cabinetmakers as a pattern book, and their clients as an aid in choosing furniture. For the benefit of the former, he provided precise dimensions, dimensions that were not Chippendale's personal invention but had been developed by furniture makers over the previous two centuries through a process of trial and error. Having described the functional model of a chair, Chippendale showed how it could be modified, using a series of drawings “which are so contrived, that if no one drawing should singly answer the Gentleman's taste, there will be found a variety of hints sufficient to construct a new one,” he wrote. Thus, the thirty-eight chairs illustrated in the
Director
provided the reader with scores of alternatives for different splats, legs, and back uprights.

Chippendale's approach of mixing and matching numerous options—think what he could have done with a modern spreadsheet—underlines an important aspect of eighteenth-century chair design. Chairmakers distinguished between applied ornamental themes, which were a function of the client's taste—and his or her pocketbook—and the basic configuration of a chair, which was fixed by tradition and experience. This ensured that whatever its appearance, a chair could be counted on to provide sturdiness, stability, and comfort.

As promised, Chippendale presented three different styles: Modern, Gothic, and Chinese. The last two, probably influenced by Darly, were pure fantasy: “Gothic” had no more to do with the Middle Ages than “Chinese” had to do with the Orient. In the case of the Chinese side chairs, the geometrical motifs were not based on actual yokeback chairs but on the decorative fretwork found in folding screens and scroll paintings. Chippendale also included three “ribband-back” chairs, which had intricate splats carved in the shape of intertwined ribbons. He rhapsodized that these chairs were “the best I have ever seen (or perhaps have ever been made).”

Ribband-back chair (after Thomas Chippendale)

The best-remembered pattern-book authors today, other than Chippendale, are George Hepplewhite and Thomas Sheraton. Their popular furniture guides went through several editions, although they lack Chippendale's authority, because no actual pieces of Hepplewhite furniture have ever been identified, and Sheraton was strictly a designer, not a cabinetmaker. So was Thomas Hope, a gifted dilettante and the author of
Household Furniture and Interior Decoration
. Nevertheless, like the
Director
, these handbooks were responsible for the spread of what was, in effect, a canon of furniture design. Thanks to these publications, provincial cabinetmakers who had no opportunity to visit a London upholsterer's showroom, let alone to see a country house interior designed by Adam or Chippendale, had at their disposal sufficient information to produce furniture of a high standard.

The Sweetness of Living

Thomas Sheraton once remarked of London cabinetmakers, “when our tradesmen are desirous to draw the best customers to their ware-rooms, they hasten over to Paris, or otherwise pretend to go there.” In November 1769, Thomas Chippendale went to Paris on a shopping trip. He returned on the Calais packet, and when it docked in Dover he paid import duty on his purchases—sixty unfinished chair frames. In those days, if a customs officer suspected fraud, he had the right to confiscate the goods, pay the importer the declared value, and sell the goods at their actual price, pocketing the difference. That is what happened to Chippendale, who had declared the total value of his chair frames as eighteen pounds, even though they were worth at least three times as much. In his defense, it should be said that at the time he was in severe financial straits. His business partner, Rannie, had recently died, and to settle his estate—and his debts—Chippendale had been obliged to auction off his shop's entire stock. Moreover, several of his clients were tardy in paying their bills, leaving him hundreds of pounds out of pocket.

Chippendale planned to complete the unfinished chairs in his own workshop. It is unclear whether he bought the frames because they were cheaper or (more likely) because he wanted to get his hands on chairs in the latest neoclassical style, which was all the rage in Paris. Like couturiers in the 1950s, Parisian furniture makers in the eighteenth century led the field. French furniture-making was highly regulated. Chippendale would have purchased his chair frames from a
menuisier
, or joiner, probably from a shop in the Bonne-Nouvelle district, where most joiners lived. The French distinguished between joiners, who worked in solid wood, and cabinetmakers, or
ébénistes
, such as Jean-François Oeben, who made Madame de Pompadour's mechanical dressing table.
Ébénistes
were the aristocracy of the trade, specializing in casework (tables, desks, commodes, armoires) covered in ornamental marquetry of precious woods. Joiners provided cabinetmakers with the rough underframe for their work, and the two crafts belonged to the same guild. If a chair frame was decoratively carved, that work was done separately by a member of the carvers guild; similarly, gilt-bronze mounts required a bronzer's participation, while turned pieces came from a turner. Painting and gilding were done by separate guilds; so was upholstery. The advantage of this division of labor was that each guild maintained high standards of workmanship and the result was exquisite furniture of exceptionally high quality.

With so many actors, who was actually responsible for design? Sometimes joiners hired upholsterers to complete a chair, sometimes upholsterers bought unfinished frames from joiners and sold the finished chair on their own account. Occasionally a customer would approach a master joiner with a specific idea, but mostly designs originated with a third party who acted as an intermediary between the customer and the craftsman. This go-between might be an architect, an artist, or an upholsterer. Upholsterers not only upholstered chairs but also supplied their customers with fabrics for wall coverings, drapes, and carpets, and thus they assumed a key role in the decoration of houses. Another middle man was the
marchand mercier
, or furniture dealer, who operated outside the guild system and was purely a merchandiser whose fashionable showroom carried a variety of home decorating goods. Although Diderot in his
Encyclopédie
defined the
marchand mercier
as “seller of everything, maker of nothing,” dealers such as Lazare Duvaux, who supplied the furnishings for Madame de Pompadour's many residences, exercised a considerable influence on their clients' tastes.

A new idea for a chair was first presented to a customer as a detailed, life-size drawing. After the general design was approved, if it was an important piece, a scale model of clay or wax was made, four to six inches high, and often incorporating alternative solutions for legs and armrests. After these details were finalized, a carver would build a larger wooden model, one-third actual size, showing the final chair complete with carved ornament and even upholstery, using fabric woven with miniature patterns. Based on this model and accompanying drawings, a joiner would make life-size working drawings of the various parts of the chair frame. These drawings were then transferred to wooden templates similar to a tailor's paper patterns. The templates were used to trace the outline of a piece onto the raw wood, generally beech or walnut. The roughly finished chair frame, complete with mortice-and-tenon joints, was provisionally assembled, then sent to a carver. Once he had done his work, he returned the finished parts to the joiner, who pegged, glued, and screwed them together, and smoothed down the joints.

If the chair was to be stained or polished, that work was done by the joiner; otherwise the finished frame was sent to a painter or a gilder. Gilding was more expensive than painting, not only because of the material but also because the carving had to be deeper to account for the coats of gesso that were applied as a base for the gold leaf. The final step was upholstering. Upholstery on the seat and back could be stuffed panels that were “dropped in” to the chair frame (and could be changed seasonally), or the fabric could be fixed permanently to the frame with brass tacks. The price of upholstering could equal or even exceed that of joinery and carving, depending on the quality of the fabric, such as specially woven tapestry.