Point Out the Number

In April 1765, Richard Gillow sent a customer two sketches for library bookcases. There was another way to choose. Gillow had Thomas Chippendale’s book, and could make one of its designs fit the intended space. The customer need only “Point out the Number”.

The offer, preserved in the Gillow correspondence and quoted by the furniture historian Morrison Heckscher, made a London designer’s work available through a cabinetmaking firm in Lancaster, in northern England. Chippendale supplied the printed design. Gillow offered to turn it into furniture for somebody else’s room.

Eleven years earlier, Chippendale had published The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. Its title named two readers with different jobs: the person choosing furniture and the person making it. In his preface, Chippendale explained that if no single drawing satisfied the customer, the book contained enough suggestions to construct a new design. An altered piece could be doing precisely what its author intended.

The chair without its apron

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a pair of mahogany chairs shows how much could survive an alteration. Their backs look like ribbons tied into bows, crossed and looped between the upright supports. The ribbons are carved wood. Below them are flowered embroidered seats and curved front legs ending in scrolls.

The museum dates the chairs to about 1755–60 and identifies their source in the Director. A plate in the first edition offered three “Ribband-back Chairs”; the design on the left provided the pattern for this pair. The loops, the bow near the top and the curving framework make the relationship visible.

The maker simplified the lower part. Ornament at the base of the central back panel was omitted, along with the carved apron beneath the seat. On the printed chair, the apron hangs between the front legs; on the made chair, that space is clear. The change preserves the back’s elaborate ribbons while giving the seat a plainer lower edge.

Chippendale later told readers that small ornaments could be left out without spoiling the design. The surviving chairs do not tell us whether their maker or purchaser made this particular choice. They have no recorded history before the 1950s. Their construction, mahogany and carving help specialists date them, but no bill ties them to Chippendale’s workshop. The museum’s description is consequently “after a design by” Chippendale.

From the right of a drawing to the left of a plate

The preparatory drawing survives too. It places the relevant chair on the right. When the drawing became an engraving, the composition was reversed: the chair moved to the left of the printed page.

That reversal marks another pair of hands in the work. At the foot of the engraving, Chippendale is credited with inventing and drawing the designs; M. Darly is credited with engraving them. The printmaker Matthias Darly was one of the professionals who translated Chippendale’s sheets into copperplates. Ink held in the engraved lines passed to paper pressed against the plate, producing the reversed impression. Johann Sebastian and Tobias Müller also worked on the book.

The book was substantial enough to belong in a library. The Met’s first-edition copy is about forty-five centimetres high, thirty wide and five thick. Its title page advertised Gothic, Chinese and Modern taste. Inside were chairs, beds, desks, cabinets, tables, shelves, clock cases and smaller furnishings, preceded by explanations of architectural orders and perspective. Buyers could compare fashionable forms without travelling from one finished room to another.

The pages also gave a maker something to work with. Measurements, enlarged mouldings, alternative ornaments and views of concealed parts accompanied the outward appearance. A drawing could suggest more than one solution within the same piece.

Raising the writing surface

One surviving sheet from 1753 shows a writing table. Across its front, Chippendale offers two patterns of geometric ornament. A side diagram explains a top that rises on a support; below are plans and profiles of the parts. The accompanying printed instructions say that the front legs draw out with the front rail. The plans show where the parts separate and how the rails join the legs. An apparently ordinary table could extend towards its user and raise an inclined working surface.

This sheet was printed in reverse in the first two editions. Other designs supplied their own details of drawers, folding surfaces and supports. A cabinetmaker could borrow a useful arrangement from a plate without reproducing the entire object surrounding it.

Chippendale defended the practical character of his work. In the preface, dated March 1754, he complained that people in his own trade had called some of the Gothic and Chinese designs impossible to execute. He answered that a skilled workman could make every design in the book, and improve its beauty in the making. The confidence was part of the salesmanship, but so was the invitation to use judgement.

A different name on the bill

At Dumfries House in Ayrshire, in southwestern Scotland, bills and surviving furniture allow that invitation to be followed beyond a visual resemblance. In 1759, Alexander Peter of Edinburgh supplied a mahogany sideboard table for the dining room. His bill, transcribed by Christopher Gilbert in a study of the house, charged seven pounds for the table, wood and packing materials.

Its design came from the Director. The broad rectangular top stands on square legs, with geometric ornament worked against a solid background rather than pierced through it. Peter followed the published pattern closely, but the Furniture History Society’s account identifies a small added saltire, a diagonal cross, in the decoration. His bill specifies a table six and a half feet long and two and a half feet deep, longer and shallower than the printed model. Chippendale’s design had become a piece made by Peter for the Earl of Dumfries.

Peter was already an established master. He had completed his Edinburgh apprenticeship in 1728 and registered thirty-seven journeymen between 1731 and 1749. His business sold ready-made furniture, took commissions and offered second-hand pieces. At Dumfries House he supplied dining chairs, tables, hall chairs, beds and a large quantity of furniture for the secondary rooms. The book entered a skilled trade with its own customers, workmen and ways of doing business.

Chippendale’s own firm supplied furniture to the same house. Its breakfast table cost six pounds and eight shillings. Here too a printed pattern was adjusted. The lower shelf was enclosed in brass wirework, an alternative to the wooden fret panels shown in the book. A drawer contained a writing slide and spaces for stationery. The firm used its own repertory flexibly, just as another cabinetmaker could.

The invoices were issued by Chippendale & Rannie. James Rannie, a fellow cabinetmaker and investor, had become Chippendale’s business partner in 1754. The famous name on the designs stood over an enterprise that needed capital, specialist workrooms, employees and reliable transport.

In May 1759 the partners wrote that the Earl’s furniture had been shipped aboard the Diligence. Glued cases were meant to protect it from water. They asked for rainproof coverings on the carts that would carry it onward, and sent a workman to install it, paid a guinea a week. Even these precautions did not prevent all damage: repairs to London-made gilding and a replacement mirror plate appear in the house’s accounts.

Made to fit, and difficult to take back

Pleasing a customer involved more than successfully translating a drawing. In 1761, the Earl returned furniture to Peter, including fifteen mahogany chairs and a bedstead, and demanded a full refund. Peter protested. The goods had been delivered more than two years earlier. Chair fashions changed annually, he wrote; the covers were soiled and the wood had darkened while the pieces stood made up.

Size made the problem worse. The easy chairs exceeded ordinary demand. The bedstead was taller and broader than the sizes Peter usually sold, and might remain in stock for years before a buyer appeared. The fifteen chairs were an awkward number for one customer to take, and newly made additions might not match their colour. Returning them also meant expense and a risk of breakage on the journey.

Peter suggested that selling them to somebody nearby might be better than sending them back. He eventually allowed the refund at cost.