History - Victoria1887

Kent started practising as an architect relatively late, in the 1730s. He is better remembered as an architect of the revived Palladian style in England. Among the great Palladian houses still to be enjoyed today, with their accent on classical lines, porticoes and the five orders are Houghton Hall and Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Interior door pillars and cornices or 'over-doors', although made of wood, had the lines and proportions of masonry, as did much of Kents' furniture.

It is not as an architect and furniture designer that Kent is famous, however, but as the father of the "picturesque", or English landscape garden. According to Horace Walpole, who was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. "Kent was a painter, an architect, and the father of modern gardening. In the first character he was below mediocrity; in the second, he was a restorer of the science; in the last, an original, and the inventor of an art that realizes painting and improves nature. Mahomet imagined an elysium, Kent created many."

Starting in 1791 he published in four volumes The Cabinet Maker's and Upholsterer's Drawing Book. And it was immediately widely influential over a large part of the country. During this period he did not have a workshop of his own and it is believed that Sheraton himself never made any of the pieces shown in his books. So a piece of furniture described as being "by Sheraton" refers to the design and not to the maker of the piece.

In 1803 he published The Cabinet Dictionary, a compendium of instructions on the techniques of cabinet and chair making. Within its pages he illustrated the French and Grecian style, and advocated much use of animal figures,torsos,heads and feet as important features. This was an innovation which affected both fine and more ordinary furniture.Then a year before his death, in 1805 he published the first volume of The Cabinet Maker, Upholsterer and General Artist's Encyclopedia. Sheraton's name is associated with the styles of furniture fashionable in the 1790s and early 19th century. Many of the designs are based on classical architecture, knowledge of which was an essential part of a designer's technical education.

Undoubtedly the most quoted of mid-eighteenth-century designers is Thomas Chippendale. Chippendale was the first to publish a book composed entirely of furniture designs. The Gentleman and Cabinet-maker's Director, published in 1754, included 160 fine line engravings showing every conceivable type of furniture, decorated or formed after the rococo, Gothic and Chinese tastes. While it contained many fantastic creations that were probably never produced, more important there were designs for both ordinary and the most elaborate furniture,which showed popular decorative motifs as being suitable for both. Justifiably, it became a best-seller By the early 1760, a classical revival had begun to replace rococo,and it was in this style that Chippendale produced some of his greatest work. First through carving and later by reviving the use of marquetry, he interpreted classical motifs in a display of controlled craftsmanship unsurpassed before or since.

George Hepplewhite was a cabinetmaker. He is regarded as having been one of the "big three" English furniture makers of the 18th century, along with Thomas Sheraton and Thomas Chippendale. There are no pieces of furniture made by Hepplewhite or his firm known to exist but he gave his name to a distinctive style of light, elegant furniture that was fashionable between about 1775 and 1800 and reproductions of his designs continued through the following centuries. One characteristic that is seen in many of his designs is a shield-shaped chair back, where an expansive shield appeared in place of a narrower splat design.