Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some light tanning due to age. Year 1953. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Previous to the opening of the present century the moderately informed member of the general public would have been at a loss to instance the names of more than five or six furniture makers or designers and those would probably have been confined to the men whose work had become familiar through the publication of their pattern books. Formerly the vague term “Chippendale” was usually good enough to cover most of the mahogany furniture of the mid-cighteenth century and the pieces inlaid with satinwood banding would be generically dubbed “Sheraton.” For the rest a “Hepplewhite” chair or an “Adam” sideboard would commonly suffice. In more recent times the carefully documented work by such expert authorities as Ralph Edwards Margaret Jourdain Constance Simon H. Clifford Smith R. W. Symonds and others has brought to light the names of eminent cabinet-makers previously overshadowed whose work places them on a par with those craftsmen whose publications had caused them to be widely known. Thus we are now made familiar with the names of Goodison Jensen Moore Vile & Cobb Seddon and others whom we rank with any of the great master cabinet-makers. Much useful spade- work has been done on the Accounts of the Royal Household and in the archives still providentially preserved in some of the famous houses. But exploration at these high levels produces only a relatively small number of new names from among all those makers who were engaged in the large cabinet-making industry which was flourishing in London during the eighteenth century and of which we have much factual evidence in what remains to us of their output at the present day. (MP)