Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors - Bill Bryson [152]
New woods and varnishes dramatically broadened the forms that furniture could take, but something else was needed—a new system of manufacture—to produce the volumes of quality furniture necessary to satisfy the endless demand. Where traditional designers like Robert Adam made a new design for each commission, furniture makers now realized that it was far more cost-effective to make lots of furniture from a single design. They began to operate a factory system on a large scale, cranking out pieces that were cut from templates, then assembled and finished by teams of specialists. The age of mass manufacture had been born.
There is a certain irony in the thought that the people who did the most to establish mass manufacturing techniques were the ones we now most revere for their craftsmanship, and of no one is that more true than a shadowy furniture maker from the north of England named Thomas Chippendale. His influence was enormous. He was the first commoner for whom a furniture style was named; before him, the names faithfully recalled monarchies: Tudor, Elizabethan, Louis XIV, Queen Anne. Yet we know remarkably little about him. We have no idea, for instance, what he looked like. Except that he was born and grew up in the market town of Otley, on the edge of the Yorkshire dales, nothing at all is known of his early life. His first appearance in the written record is in 1748, when he arrives in London, already aged thirty, and sets up as a new type of maker and purveyor of household furnishings known as an upholder.
That was an ambitious thing to do, for upholders’ businesses tended to be complicated and extensive. One of the most successful, George Seddon, employed four hundred workmen—carvers, gilders, joiners, makers of mirrors and brass, and so on. Chippendale did not operate on quite that scale, but he employed forty or fifty men, and his premises covered two frontages at 60–62 St. Martin’s Lane, just around the corner from the modern Trafalgar Square (though that wouldn’t exist for another eighty years). He also provided an extremely complete service, making and selling chairs, occasional tables, dressing tables, writing tables, card tables, bookcases, bureaus, mirrors, clock cases, candelabra, candle stands, musicstands, sconces, commodes, and an exotic new contrivance that he called a “sopha.” Sofas were daring, even titillating, because they resembled beds and so hinted at salacious repose. The firm also stocked wallpaper and carpets, and undertook repairs, furniture removals, and even funerals.
Thomas Chippendale made indisputably fine furniture, but so did lots of others. St. Martin’s Lane alone had thirty furniture makers in the eighteenth century, and hundreds more were scattered across London and throughout the country. The reason we all know Chippendale’s name today is that in 1754 he did something quite audacious. He issued a book of designs called The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, containing 160 plates. Architects had been doing this sort of thing for nearly two hundred years, but nobody had thought to do it for furniture. The drawings were unexpectedly beguiling. Instead of being flat, two-dimensional templates, as was standard, they were perspective drawings, full of shadow and sheen. The prospective purchaser could immediately visualize how these handsome and desirable objects would look in his own home.
It would be misleading to call Chippendale