We are delighted to announce that the Society has acquired six previously unknown furniture drawings, two attributed to Thomas Chippendale senior and four to Thomas Chippendale junior.
The drawings were bought from London dealer Thomas Heneage and came originally from an album of drawings in a collection in Canada. The album bore the bookplate of Alexander Manning (1819-1903), an Irish immigrant who had arrived in Toronto in 1834. A carpenter by training, he became one of the most successful builders and property developers in Toronto and was also active in local politics, serving twice as mayor in 1873 and 1885. In later life he became a philanthropist and patron of the arts, but the drawings presumably relate to his professional interests as a builder.
It is not known how Manning acquired the drawings, and their provenance prior to his ownership is unknown, but confirmation of their link to Thomas Chippendale is provided by the drawing for a lantern pedestal, which is the design drawing for a set of six supplied to Harewood House in 1774. The bill for the pedestals and lanterns runs as follows:
6 Antique Brass Gerandoles with ornaments on pedestals finely Chased & finished in Gold Lacquer with three Branches each, carving the patterns in Wood for Casting and afterwards Chasing the Patterns in Lead and brass &c. Included… £90 12 0.
The pedestals are still at Harewood where they were recorded in the 1795 inventory as ‘6 Green & gold Pedestals & Lamps’ on the Principal Staircase. They were subsequently repainted but traces of the original green and gold scheme can be seen beneath the later paint.
The six new drawings are by two different hands. Two are thought to date from about 1760 and are typical of Thomas Chippendale senior’s free-flowing style with its use of delicate washes to suggest shadow and perspective.
The other four, however, are by a quite different hand – nervous, linear and of course strongly neo-Classical in style. The three uncoloured drawings have strong similarities in content and style with the engravings published by Thomas Chippendale junior in 1779. Having consulted with colleagues at the V&A and, of course, with Judith Goodison, we are now confident that these are by Thomas Chippendale junior. Figure 5 is for a bookcase or a china cabinet, and figure 6 is thought to be a piano or harpsichord case, decorated either with paint or marquetry. All three have been extracted from the same sketchbook, with matching watermarks and binding holes. The sixth drawing is different again but is also attributed to Chippendale junior.
These are first furniture drawings by Thomas Chippendale junior to be discovered and the first Chippendale drawings of any kind in the fully mature neo-Classical style of the 1770s. There is nothing like them either in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the V&A, which are the two principal collections of Chippendale drawings.
Unlike his father, Chippendale junior was probably not trained as a cabinet maker but as a designer, and it is thought that for some years in the mid-late 1760s he trained in Robert Adam’s drawing office with George Richardson, Adam’s principal draughtsman. This would explain the close relationship between the Chippendale firm’s style of the 1770s and Robert Adam’s neo-Classical designs. Chippendale junior was first recorded as active in his father’s firm in 1766, aged 17. His first signed design is a neo-Classical tablet dated 1772 which bears a striking relationship to some of the drawings here discussed (illustrated in Goodison (2017), figs 3 & 9). But it has long been assumed that he did not assume a significant role in his father’s firm until c.1775-6, by which time his father was becoming infirm. The new drawings suggest this assumption is incorrect and demonstrate not only that Chippendale junior was involved much earlier than previously thought, but that it might have been Chippendale junior and not his father who was responsible for designing the firm’s remarkable neo-Classical furniture of the 1770s. In the world of British furniture history, and of Chippendale studies in particular, this notion is nothing short of revolutionary, and has the potential to overturn more than a hundred years of published scholarship.
Acknowledgements
The acquisition of these drawings was assisted by generous grants from the following: American Friends of the Chippendale Society in the Decorative Arts Trust; Friends of the National Libraries; Leeds Art Fund; Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society; The Headley Trust. We are grateful to them all.