From Louis Seize to Thomas Sheraton

from the book "The Practical Book Of Period Furniture", by Harold Donaldson Eberlein And Abbot McClure.

In the Louis Seize period there was a noticeable return to rectilinear principles in the design of furniture. Vertical and horizontal lines were emphasised and some of the cabinet-work possessed a distinctly perpendicular aspect. While curved surfaces did not altogether disappear from cabinet-work, carcases were in the main rectilinear. Although the amenity of curves in the shapes of chair seats, backs and arms and in the rounding of corners was not disdained, the legs of tables, chairs, sofas, stools and cabinets were almost altogether straight, and the same may be said of stretchers where they occur. Legs and stretchers displaying curves were only the exceptions that proved the rule. Had it not been for the grace of well-placed embellishment, not a little of the furniture might have been open to the charge of angularity. As it was, however, ornament was so adroitly disposed that it enhanced the classic purity of structural lines without the loss of distinction resulting from superfluity.

The representative Sheraton type of furniture, as we are accustomed to understand it, was based entirely on his first book and richly deserves all the distinction and originality he claims for it. In his later books there is a marked and rapid deterioration in the quality of the designs given. Whether it was because Sheraton was failing in inspiration, or because he was trying to accommodate his designs to a popular taste that clamoured loudly for the latest French forms, it would be hard to say. It was probably the latter, for one who had produced types of such artistic excellence a few years before could scarcely sink to such depths of impoverished invention independently of some extraneous cause. This inference is supported by the pathetic laments he utters, as early as 1802, that "a clumsy four-footed stool from France will be admired by our connoisseurs in preference to a first-rate cabinet of English production" or that the British public has brought to pass this deplorable state of affairs by "foolishly staring after French fashions" instead of giving "suitable encouragement to designers and artists" in England. "Instead of this," he says, "when our tradesmen are desirous to draw the best customers to their warerooms, they hasten over to Paris, or otherwise pretend to go there, plainly indicating either our own defects in cabinet-making, or extreme ignorance, that we must be pleased and attracted by the mere sound of French taste."So bad were his later designs, so jejune in character and so impregnated with a debased French feeling that it seems almost unfair, and is certainly prejudicial to a clear understanding of types, to attach Sheraton's name to them. We shall, therefore, pass them by with scant notice.

Sheraton's "Drawing Book," the publication upon which his claims to a distinctive style are wholly based, was a most important and valuable addition to the literature of cabinet-making. Unfortunately a fair-minded reader cannot fail to be annoyed and repelled by the disparaging and acrid attitude he assumes towards the designs and achievements of his predecessors and contemporaries, of whom he speaks uncharitably and contemptuously. Chippendale's designs he brands as "now wholly antiquated and laid aside;" Manwar-ing's book contains nought "but what an apprentice boy may be taught by seven hours' proper instructions;" for some of Shearer's work he did, indeed, express measured admiration and proved the sincerity of his admiration by adopting and really improving some of his designs; but of Hepplewhite, the designer between whose plans and his own there was the closest similarity, a similarity positively perplexing at times, he says, while grudgingly conceding that a few of the designs in his book "are not without merit," "if we compare some of the designs, particularly the chairs, with the newest taste, we shall find that this work has already caught the decline, and perhaps, in a little time will suddenly die in the disorder." This of a volume published but five years before his own