A friend just told me that no piece of Chippendale furniture can actually be attributed to having been made by Thomas Chippendale. Is this true? I googled around a bit but couldnt seem to find the answer.
Chippendale ran a large workshop, employing perhaps 50 joiners, cabinetmakers, polishers and other craftsmen. He himself was responsible for design, marketing and overall management. It’s not likely that he did much of the actual cabinetry.
Of course, it didn’t start out that way. His father was a woodworker and he himself was trained. And presumably his business started out in a small way, with him doing a good deal of the work.
We can identify many pieces which are known to have come Chippendale’s workshop, but it’s unlikely that he worked on many of them (though it is possible).
But Chippendale’s fame is as a designer, not a craft worker. The standards of workmanship in his firm were high, but there is no reason to think that any piece in which he had an actual hand was better produced than pieces which were produced by other hands. What makes a genuine Chippendale genuine is that it was designed by him and produced in his workshop.
Same idea as with turn of the century Tiffany lamps. A lot of the time you see it noted as Tiffany Studios.
He was an entrepreneur who ran a large business a bit like a modern fashion house. The ‘names’ on the masthead, do not actually sit at a sewing machine making the frocks.
To add to what UDS has said, your friend’s statement only makes sense if they mean that there is no way of distinguishing between works by Chippendale’s own hand and those by his workmen. But so what? No one at the time buying a ‘Chippendale’ from him thought that such a distinction mattered. Anymore than any informed person today buying a ‘Damien Hirst’ or a ‘Jeff Koons’.
What however do exist are quite a few ‘Chippendale’ pieces where there is firm documentary evidence, such as letters, invoices or accounts in family archives, proving that those specific pieces were supplied by Chippendale. Such examples, as those at Harewood, Nostell Priory or Dumfries House, are the gold standard of Chippendale furniture - their impeccable provenances mean that they are worth more if they ever get sold and they also help the experts identify other, less well-documented examples.
I think the point of the receipts was to verify that the entire collection was a single purchase, and not pieces from here and there to make it.
The receipts don’t actually prove that any one piece was part of the original purchase, but they do show thats its wrong to say “no one has a collection that big, it must be faked !”.
Thomas Chippendale also published The Gentleman & Cabinet Maker’s Director. So “Chippendales” could even be made in the Colonies. (And some of them, even if not original, are quite valuable now.
On the contrary, in some such cases descriptions in the documents are sufficiently detailed to link them to specific pieces. Eighteenth-century invoices could be quite detailed, if only to satisfy the purchaser that what they were paying for was what they had received. This was all the more important with large orders, when the purchaser would want the pieces itemised.
No, no. There’s a distinction between pieces made in the Chippendale style, or after a Chippendale pattern, and pieces supplied by Chippendale.
I remember seeing an Antiques Roadshow in which a lady brought a sewing table she found at an antique shop; she recognized the feet as being something important, but didn’t remember what it was.
Guy on the Show: Well, this was made by Duncan Phyfe.
Lady: Oh, right, that’s a pretty famous company.
GotS: Um… no, Duncan Phyfe actually made this table. With his hands.
It was worth a lot of money.
Very enlightening. Not that I had ever thought about it too much I guess but I would have assumed a Chippendale chair was made by the man himself. Thanks for the info and the links.
I thought it was made by either a group of glitzy male dancers, or two chipmunks…