Drawing
Über das Werk
Thomas Chippendale was a fashionable designer and cabinet-maker in the eighteenth-century, providing furniture to such famous contemporary figures as David Garrick. His company produced high-quality furniture, including some key masterpieces, but Chippendale’s outstanding skill was in design. His pattern-book The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director went through three editions in the 1750s and 60s and inspired trade catalogues and pattern-books from fellow designers. Usually produced by architects, a large, elegant pattern-book was an ambitious project for a craftsman at this time. The Director showed the full range of furniture available in the eighteenth century, and the range of styles that were fashionable. Chippendale created a trademark fusion of rococo style with Chinese and gothic elements, which was the basis of ‘English’ rococo.
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His style influenced furniture design in contemporary Europe and colonial America, and had a marked Victorian revival in England. The Director designs were the main source for Chippendale’s high reputation until his furniture was first identified in 1906. The lack of furniture as evidence helped to fuel theories that Chippendale's designs had been 'ghosted' for him by Matthias Lock and his assistant Henry Copland, partly due to the mixed nature of Lock and Chippendale material that came to the V&A in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It now seems most probable that Lock provided piece-work carving for Chippendale’s larger projects.
Victoria and Albert Museum
