The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide
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George Hepplewhite (d. 1786) was the most famous of Chippendale's successors among England's master cabinetmaker-designers. So synonymous with excellence in design and craftsmanship was his name that it has been given to one of the most influential styles of English furniture.
In 1788 Hepplewhite's widow, Alice, issued a catalog of his designs, a magnificent folio of engraved plates representing the prevailing furniture styles, particularly the characteristic "taper-leg Hepplewhite" and the various chair and chair-back styles most often associated with the Hepplewhite school. The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide, second only to Chippendale's Director in importance and thoroughness, was enormously influential, spreading quickly throughout the Continent and the colonies and guiding the style and construction of furniture everywhere. A second edition was issued the following year, and an extensively revised third edition in 1794. Today this classic collection is a very rare and highly valued work.
This present volume is an unaltered and unabridged republication of the enlarged third edition of The Guide. The articles of furniture depicted are extremely varied: chairs, stools, sofas, sideboards, beds, pedestals, cellarets, desks, bookcases, tables, chests of drawers, dressing glasses, wardrobes, brackets, fire-screens, and many other items. The plates contain elegant drawings which reveal the practical and unpretentious craftsmanship that sets the Hepplewhite style apart, along with many special enlargements of accessories such as chair backs, table-tops, bed-pillars, cornices, trims for busts and moldings, and other details.
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The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide - George Hepplewhite
THE
CABINET-MAKER
& UPHOLSTERER’S
GUIDE
THE
CABINET-MAKER
& UPHOLSTERER’S
GUIDE
George Hepplewhite
THE THIRD EDITION OF 1794
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY
JOSEPH ARONSON
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC., NEW YORK
Copyright © 1969 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
This Dover edition, first published in 1969, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the third (1794) edition, as published by I. and J. Taylor, London. A new introduction has been written specially for the present edition by Joseph Aronson.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 69-19164
International Standard Book Number
ISBN-13: 978-0-486-22183-0
ISBN-10: 0-486-22183-0
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
22183014
www.doverpublications.com
INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION
The sole documented fact presently known about George Hepplewhite is that he died. This event in 1786 preceded by two years the first appearance of his monument, the publication entitled The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide … from drawings, over the name of A. Hepplewhite and Co. Cabinet-Makers, and published by I. and J. Taylor, at the Architectural Library, No. 56, Holborn, opposite Great Turn-Stile
in London. The 1788 debut was followed the next year by a slightly revised edition, and in 1794 by the improved
third edition which is reproduced here.
A. Hepplewhite, the widow Alice, was granted administration of the estate of George Hepplewhite on June 27, 1786. Described as less than £600,
this estate could hardly have been the residue of a wildly successful business, compared with the substantial contemporary enterprises of which records survive. Of his business, and of George Hepplewhite’s personal life, there remains no attributable vestige: no stick of wood, no shred of paper, no bills or letters. The name appears in print only on six plates in a contemporary publication, The Cabinet-Makers’ London Book of Prices, editions of 1788 and later. Twenty plates by Thomas Shearer and three by W. Casement which complete this work bear a strong family resemblance, as do all the plates of Shearer’s Designs for Household Furniture (1788) and, to an extent, even some of Thomas Sheraton’s examples in his 1791 Drawing Book. The inevitable question is, How did the name of George Hepplewhite come to identify a complete school of furniture design, the style of the whole generation after Chippendale’s Director?
The broad answer is, of course, that there remains a book illustrating work of the period and bearing Hepplewhite’s name. The architecture and allied arts of the eighteenth century were effectively memorialized in a significant library of contemporary origin.* Three works stand out by reason of their comprehensive scope, the quality of their engravings, the definiteness of their subject matter in delineating a style-period, and their wide distribution at home and abroad. Chippendale, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton are the trisyllabic triad who throughout the nineteenth century were credited with the total furniture output of the Georgian era. In the early decades of the twentieth century serious researchers—Constance Simon, R. S. Clouston, Percy Macquoid, Raiph Edwards, Margaret Jourdain, and Herbert Cescinsky, among others—compared bills and labels, account books and letters, drawings and actual surviving furniture. Their conclusions, paired with careful reading of texts, and dedicatory remarks in particular, call for a reappraisal of the functions and motivations of the three immortal masters, In short, these men live through their publications rather than through their furniture performances.
The Preface to the Hepplewhite work is a treasury of inferences. As modest as it is brief, it neither implies originality nor imputes design invention to Hepplewhite. It is directed first to the artisan, secondly to the gentleman; it has no list of patrons or subscribers, although such lists were usual in publications of