Chats on Old Furniture: A Practical Guide for Collectors

by Arthur Hayden

SHERATON ARMCHAIR; MAHOGANY, ABOUT 1780.

ADAM ARMCHAIR; MAHOGANY, ABOUT 1790.

ARMCHAIR OF WALNUT, SHIELD-BACK CARVED WITH THREE OSTRICH FEATHERS. IN HEPPELWHITE STYLE. LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

CHAIR OF WALNUT, SHIELD-BACK; IN THE STYLE OF HEPPELWHITE. LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

In 1790, a set of designs of English furniture were published by A. Heppelwhite. In these chairs with pierced backs, bookcases with fancifully framed glass doors, and mahogany bureaux, the influence of Chippendale is evident, but the robustness of the master and the individuality of his style become transformed into a lighter and more elegant fashion, to which French finesse and the Adam spirit have contributed their influence.

In the illustration (p. [243]) various types of chairs of the period are given. A chair termed the "ladder-back" was in use in France at the same time. In Chardin's celebrated picture of "Le jeu de l'oye," showing the interior of a parlour of the middle eighteenth century, a chair of this type is shown.

The Heppelwhite settee illustrated as the headpiece to this chapter shows the delicate fluting in the woodwork, and the elaborated turned legs which were beginning to be fashionable at the close of the eighteenth century. The two chairs by Heppelwhite & Co., illustrated (p. [243]), are typical examples of the elegance of the style which has an individuality of its own—a fact that collectors are beginning to recognise.

The shield-back chair with wheat-ear and openwork decoration, and legs in which the lathe has been freely used, are characteristic types. The elegance of the legs in Heppelwhite chairs is especially noticeable. The designers departed from Chippendale with results exquisitely symmetrical, and of most graceful ornamentation.

Hogarth, in his biting satires on the absurdities of Kent, the architect, painter, sculptor, and ornamental gardener, whose claims to be any one of the four rest on slender foundations, did not prevent fashionable ladies consulting him for designs for furniture, picture frames, chairs, tables, for cradles, for silver plate, and even for the construction of a barge. It is recorded by Walpole that two great ladies who implored him to design birthday gowns for them were decked out in incongruous devices: "the one he dressed in a petticoat decorated in columns of the five orders, and the other like a bronze, in a copper-coloured satin, with ornaments of gold."

Heppelwhite learned the lesson of Hogarth, that "the line of beauty is a curve," and straight lines were studiously avoided in his designs. Of the varieties of chairs that he made, many have the Prince of Wales's feathers either carved upon them in the centre of the open-work back or japanned upon the splat, a method of decoration largely employed in France, which has not always stood the test of time, for when examples are found they often want restoration. Of satin-wood, with paintings upon the panels, Heppelwhite produced some good examples, and when he attempted greater elaboration his style in pieces of involved design and intricacy of detail became less original, and came into contact with Sheraton. His painted furniture commands high prices, and the name of Heppelwhite will stand as high as Chippendale or Sheraton for graceful interpretations of the spirit which invested the late eighteenth century.