The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [128]
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’s book a sensation, because only 308 copies were sold, but the purchasers included forty-nine members of the aristocracy, which made it disproportionately influential. It was also snapped up by other furniture makers and craftsmen, raising another point of oddness—that Chippendale was openly inviting his competitors to make use of his designs for their own commercial purposes. This helped ensure Chippendale’s posterity, but didn’t do much for his immediate fortunes since potential clients could now get Chippendale furniture made more cheaply by any reasonably skilled joiner. It also meant two centuries of difficulty for furniture historians in determining which pieces of furniture are genuine Chippendales and which are copies made using his book. Even if a piece is a “genuine” Chippendale, it doesn’t mean that Thomas Chippendale ever touched it or was even aware of its existence. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that he designed it. No one knows how much talent he brought in, or whether the designs in his books are in fact from his own hand. A genuine Chippendale simply means that it came from his workshop.
Such is the Chippendale aura, however, that it needn’t even have been as close to him as that. In 1756 in colonial Boston, a furniture maker named
John Welch, using a Chippendale pattern as a guide, made a mahogany desk that he sold to a man named Dublois. The desk stayed in the Dublois family for 250 years. In 2007, Dublois’s descendants put it up for auction with Sotheby’s in New York. Though Thomas Chippendale had no direct connection to it, it sold for just under $3.3 million.
Inspired by Chippendale’s success, other English furniture makers issued pattern books of their own. George Hepplewhite’s Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide was published in 1788, and Thomas Sheraton followed with the Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book, issued in installments between 1791 and 1794. Sheraton’s book had more than twice as many subscribers as Chippendale’s and was translated into German, a distinction not accorded Chippendale’s own volume. Hepplewhite and Sheraton became particularly popular in America.
Although any piece of furniture directly associated with any of the three is today worth a fortune, they were more admired than celebrated in their own lifetimes, and at times not even all that admired. Chippendale’s fortunes slipped