Creating the true Story about the English Icon. named: Thomas Chippendale.

    My task at hand today? in producing this new website: is to bring to everyone : The High Volume. of Rococo Furniture accedited to: Thomas Chippendale, which has given false evidence for Too Long.

Thomas Chippendale. was babtised:3rd June:1718. At: Otley Parish Church.  Note: His statue today,situated in:The Market Place, Otley.where his father, John traded as a Joyner, (The Birth place of Thomas Chippendale) 

Note: He died  on: 13th November. 1779. Note: this entey comes from the: Regestor, St Martins-in-the-Fields,  London.

        Tt is widely stated in referance books today , he started his London business in :1750. at the age of 32. (full time). Before his gained  position of :60-61-62,  St Martins Lane in:1754.

Note:He contacted, The Landlord, Mr Robert Burges, about the propotys in:  St Martin Lane,he was interested in renting?.  Note:Which Matthias Lock,was renting at this same time?  As a drawing school:1754.

Thomas Chippendale go this property.( Matthias Lock Evicted). because: Mr Burges was drunk on: Meed. Left is,6o,St Martins Lane. The Home of: Thomas Chippendale. It's still as it was in:1754, Today. L-H-S, is:61, the  Entrance to his yard/workshops, where Chippendale Rannie , workshop's  once stood.62: is today a tea room cafe.

On  his Opening day?  Chippendale was selling his new book  

                                                                                                                      'The Gentleman and Cabinetmakers Director.

( Above? Is the 1966 Cloth  Bound, Dover Edition? Jack Plane Note: Never seen calf? Note:Ex Library Copy? in Cloth.

                                                                                               Thomas Chippendale- Workforce.

 Now lets inspect Chippendale's  workforce, we can do this, with help from his Fire claim 1755, after his workshop fire, Where 22 workman's work benches. (or tool chests) it matters little, which, Remembering he only used hand tools in 1754?(Machines not invented). So all his cut. Timber, IE: Cuban Mahogany, which is very heavy, ( Sailing Ship Ba-lass)? dumped on the key side, to gain time & speed over the competitor back to america)

All this hard  heavy wood. had to be carted back to St Martins Lane? then cut by hand (Very hard Graft & Sweat?In the saw pit ?(all day long)? give us some slang words today?: Top Dog?and: Under Dog? to name just two?. then it had to be ' Air Dried, when dry? This still had to be worked, Remember?, All Sawing, Planeing,Mortise & Tenon, carving, scraping,(no sand paper then) whoops?allmost forgot? There finish was  'linseed oil' ( 3 months of drying) The linseed finnish could be buffet  with waxed, That is a long time in my Book . never mind in 1754.

      Fire claim?  If we double his losses, we get 44, in Total.(Remember appentice's need training) So he must have been feeling  he is going back-words.

  So how can so much Rococo Furniture be made by so few, Working with so much Difficult. Note: Today there is books full of his stuff. Complete. Pop-wash, Bunkum, and Rollocks’. To use: 3 Great Phrases. The Very reson I contacted 'Winsor Castle' see the News Section

                                 The Original Advertisement from Chippendale said "Supplying Antick (Antique) furniture today for tomorrow's use"

      As you will see from the photographs on my website I can produce some of the finest chairs, tables, cabinets, plaques, carvings and various other pieces of fine furniture and period pieces. In fact, if it can be made from wood I can make it to any design you require.

I also undertake specialist orders from collectors for carved pieces from "The Director" and have done so for over Forty  years. My most treasured carved piece to date is: The Thomas Chippendale, Ribban-back  Chair,

(The Phoenix Chair) followed closely by: The Impossible  chair which I feel will both be of particular interest to both collectors and museums alike.

Please contact me if you require any quality pieces of any type made to your own requirements.

Quality Guaranteed.

So how did such a great amount of Furniture get made. other makers of that day.

Note?There were many serious competitors in the 1750s to Chippendale, and we might start here with William Hallett, and his later partners William Vile and John Cobb. None of them  subscribed to the Director, so as to avoid,they had copied (as many of lesser status did) its attractive designs. They had sufficient ability  to survive by their own merits. senior partner, William Hallett (1707-81) had been successful with his accomplished with mahogany furniture, and by an advantageous marriage to an heiress had no need, . William Vile trained under Hallett, and in 1751, together with a Norfolk-born upholsterer, John Cobb, he set up in partnership near to Chippendale in St. Martin's Lane. Hallett acted as their financial backer and continued to support them for the rest of their lives. He outlived Vile, who died in 1767,and Cobb, died in 1778. Examples of oval beads on furniture attributed to Vile in the early 1750s show the hazards of crediting authorship without documentation. The mahogany table press made by Benjamin Goodison for the Earl of Leicester at Holkham in 1751 also has applied ovals on each side. There are indications that the freelance carver Sefferin Alken supplied them to several makers, including Vile. But the latter does seem to have made some furniture.

There were other able contenders for a patron's purse and interest-in particular, Note: William and John Linnell, both: William Inca and John Mayhews Rivals. 

                                                                                                         The 'Impossible' Chair's. 

                                                                                                                The Design

                                                                          Dr J  Hemingway. carving the first ever. Impossible Chair.

                                                                                                          in his studio in 1999.

                                                                                                  Thomas  Johnson

                                                                                 1714-1779

 Was teaching carving, drawing and modelling. He had already published several suites of engravings in a flamboyant rococo style in the 1750s, and his name is associated with a small range of highly mannered furniture. Not least in this connection is a set of four candlesticks, c 1758, which correspond closely to a 1756 design in his One Hundred and Flfty New designs (which was freely adapted by Chippendale in the 1762 edition of the Director, Plate CX1V). Two are now at the Philadelphia Museums one at the Victoria and Albert Museum and one at Temple Newsam House, Leeds. They have lobed tops supported on an irregular shaft of clustered columns, entwined by a pair of dolphins mounted on an intermediate triangular base of piled rockwork. Made for George, 1st Lord Lyttelton, of Hagley Hall, Worcestershire,they are in the vanguard of all rococo furniture of the 1750s.to his real abilities, Many of Johnson's designs, unlike those were, however, marred by an excess of blurring the structural outlines. Circular and oval mirrors were also given in every pattern-book, with carved squirrels perched on the crestings and long-beaked birds, rush fronds, bulrushes central heads of Apollo and floral sprays. Among the most attractive mirrors are the overmantel examples, in which a rectangle would be surrounded by a froth of exuberant carving, with paintings often incorporated in an upper or lower stage, and brackets provided to display oriental porcelain. A lively imagination was a first requirement for a carver, and in those . examples which incorporated depictions of architecture and ruins Chippendale urged that the ornament 'must be carved very bold, like that of Mattius Lock,

Ornament ?  which shows chippendale worked with Lock around 1740.

The French e'be'niste Pierre Langlois, born in Paris about 1738,  settled in London by the late 1750s and is known only by furniture completed within a very

short period of time. His trade-card recorded 'all sorts of fine Cabinets and Commodes made and inlaid in the Politest manner with Brass and Tortoiseshell . . .' His first known commission was for the 4th Duke of Bedford in 1759, and suggests that by that year his reputation was established in London.

Commodes were Pierre Langlois's speciality. He created them in bold serpentine form in the early 1760s, with doors or drawers, and decorated with coloured marquetry of flowers and musical instruments set against light-coloured herringbone-pattern backgrounds.

The tops, inlaid with brass or marquetry, were set on deal carcases. The inexpensive deal was used in chamfered panels at the back, and painted black to hide its cheapness. The corner ormolu mounts, wreathing down the curved legs and terminating in a scroll foot and volute, were presumably imported from France- some examples have a crown 'C' mark, showing that tax has been paid-or were cast from French examples.

It was at this stage of his career, the early 1760s when he was turning forty years old, that Chippendale demonstrated the extent of his mature abilities and business acumen. The rising star in the architectural firmament was Robert Adam (1728-92), fresh back in 1758 from four years' training in Italy and bent on introducing English patrons to a refined form of the antique-classicism adapted in a linear and elegant way to a new style of decoration. Any furniture-maker who wanted to be in on the profitable vogue had to change his whole output from rococo, Gothic and Chinese, intermeshed as they were, to precise nee-classical shapes. This subject was addressed by Chippendale in the and edition of the Director (1762). The tide of opinion had been turning slowly throughout the 1750s, lacking focus and impetus, but accepting the archaeological designs found in the publications of Robert Wood and James Dawkins, Ruins of palmyra (1753) and the Ruins of Balbec (1757), and in Piranesi's etchings of the remains of ancient civilizations. James Stuart, William Chambers and Robert Adam had all returned from studying in Italy and embarked on neo-classical projects. How- ever, it has been suggested that, important as these books and events were, the percipient Chippendale had started to design furniture which revealed neoclassical precepts 'at least three years before Robert Adam's first essay in this style'. He 'experimented with fluted term legs, combined with rails treated as a Doric frieze; he used caryatid supports united to a Doric entablature and employed classical.

                                                                                           Ince & Mayhew 

 had established the outline of a business, they decided, in 1759, to issue designs 'in weekly numbers'. They imitated Chippendale's Director both in the intended number of plates (160) and in the use of Matthew Darly as engraver. Unfortunately they underestimated the amount of work required, and they had to compete with the build-up by Chippendale to his third edition; the venture foundered in the autumn of 1760 after the appearance of Part 21. The astute Robert Sayer, one of the most successful eighteenth- century print-sellers, not averse to plagiarism when it suited him, then issued about 90 of the engravings in a large folio titled Universal System of Household Furniture.

It was dedicated to George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, for whom the firm were later to work at Blenheim Palace. Rococo with Gothic and Chinese overtones, formed the main style of the designs. Some were unashamedly copied from the 1754 edition of the Director, but explanatory notes were printed in both English and French.

As one of the most accomplished carvers generation, if the suites of engravings of the late of his 1750s

 demi-figures on the open lower stage of a cabinet and stands.

                                                                                                     Christipher Gilbert

                                                                                 The Life and work of Thomas Chippendale.

                                                                                                                    1978

Elegant ovals were made to serve for looking glass shapers giranholes

Then in the 1800's  we get: Taylor & Hobson Ltd,( 1851-1991) One Short  answer. more on this,Amazing firm of. :Taylor & Hobson Ltd. find out more on its own  page,  on this website.

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