Thomas Sheraton's Classical Revival Furniture Designs

By Thomas Sheraton

Thomas Sheraton's trade card offered his services as delineator and designer. In this capacity he began to publish The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing-Book in 1791. With additions and alterations it reached completed form in 1794. In the process it changed from a wordy treatise on mechanical drawing, perspective, and orthographic projection to an exemplar of furniture design. Indeed, by its masterful selection of the best of the Late Adam Classical Revival, it epitomized in textbook style the range and taste in English furniture in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The examples advanced from the Hepplewhite choices of only a few years earlier, adding decorative elegance and the restrained richness of ornament inspired by acute observation of the contemporary style of Louis XVI.
This Dover edition is essentially the furniture sourcebook of the Drawing-Book, a grand résumé of the noblest themes of the Classical Revival as inspired by the Brothers Adam and rendered into furniture by countless cabinetmakers, craftsmen, and artists who served one of history’s most self-consciously opulent societies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Apr 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9780486142685

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The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing Book

Thomas Sheraton

Copyright

Copyright © 1972 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 1972, reproduces material from various early editions of The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book published by the author in London between 1793 and 1802. It also contains several new features, including a new introduction by Joseph Aronson, written specially for the present edition. For details, see the Publisher’s Note opposite.

The publisher is grateful to Dr. Adolf Placzek, Avery Librarian at Columbia University, and to Mr. Arthur Whallon, for making available for reproduction rare early editions of this work in their collections.

9780486142685

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-77998

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

22255109

www.doverpublications.com

Publisher’s Note

The present volume reproduces from the original publications all the material pertaining to furniture to be found in the editions of Sheraton’s Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book published within the author’s lifetime. Material on geometry and perspective that does not pertain directly to furniture has been omitted. The following breakdown shows what has been included here. All inclusions are from the 1793 edition unless otherwise stated.

Frontispiece Explained.

Frontispiece.

Title page.

Contents of the Three Parts.

Directions for finding . . . the Plates (the original list of plates, showing their original placement within the book; this 1793 list is reproduced in its entirety, and thus includes Plates 1 through 23 of Parts I and II—omitted in the present volume —and fails to include the plates of the Appendix and the Accompaniment—added to the present volume).

Contents (the original 1793 listing in its entirety—hence including sections omitted here and excluding sections added here).

[The List of Subscribers that originally followed is omitted here.]

To Cabinet-Makers and Upholsterers in General (in the 1802 edition this foreword was revised and a section To the Reader was added).

[Omitted here are the Introduction to Part the First ; all of Part I, with Plates 1-13 showing geometrical figures and architectural orders; and most of Part II, including Plates 14–23 showing perspective constructions.]

Plates 24–26 of Part II and the text pertaining to the furniture figures in these plates (this material is on pages 34–47 of the present volume).

Part III in its entirety, with all plates.

[Omitted here are the Errata, which pertain exclusively to omitted sections of the text, and a second List of Subscribers—this second list is perhaps found only in the 1794 edition.]

Appendix to the Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book in its entirety, with all 33 plates—omitting only the list of plates and the list of subscribers. Six text pages and eight plates (the so-called Additional Plates) have been added to this Appendix from the 1802 edition. (In one copy of the 1794 edition that we examined, six of these plates were bound in without text. The 1802 edition adds them, with text, to the Appendix, as we have done here.)

An Accompaniment to the Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book in its entirety, with all 14 plates—omitting only a further list of subscribers. This Accompaniment is reproduced from the 1794 edition, the first edition to contain it.

Two Descriptive Indexes listing the pieces of furniture by genre, reproduced from the 1802 edition, in which they first appear.

New features of the present edition are the Introduction by Joseph Aronson; an additional, consecutive, pagination (Dover page numbers); a table of contents and a list of plates showing our specific inclusions and using the Dover page numbers. All this new material appears on pages with roman folio numbers, and precedes the material listed above reproduced from original editions.

Introduction to the Dover Edition

Thomas Sheraton could never in his dreary life have imagined that his name would become the appellation of a furniture style that climaxes the Georgian while it forecasts the Regency and the Victorian of the English sphere of influence. It was certainly not his intention in 1791, when he announced his projected Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book, to offer anything beyond a manual of instruction in drafting, geometric representation, the Orders of Architecture and perspective, with suitable comments and examples. As a journeyman cabinetmaker, he would inevitably choose articles of furniture for illustrative examples; as a preacher and pedant, he could not resist adding moralities and mythology within the best eighteenth-century construction of philosophy. Thus the work became, in its final form, a monument of unplanned exposition, a landmark in the history of furniture design and a record of reluctant concessions to the fluctuating vicissitudes of a time of turmoil and swift change—and to the pressures of importunate subscribers. The time, the place and the man were all wrong for each other, and for the molding of a memorable representative style. Yet this is what Thomas Sheraton achieved by inadvertence.

Thomas Sheraton was born in 1751 in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, and early fell into his father’s trade of cabinetmaking. He seems to have reached London about 1790, but his progress from his birthplace may have been long and indirect. It is possible that as a journeyman cabinetmaker he may have paused to earn his living at various towns along the route, for his first subscription list includes many cabinetmakers whom he may have met in such places. The projected Drawing-Book germinated during his first year in London, when he may have issued the prospectus, the title page of which, dated 1791, is here reproduced as Figure A. This was apparently accompanied by ten pages of text (ending page 14) and a remarkable allegorical frontispiece, with the Frontispiece Explained. The text states the objectives of the work entirely in the future tense. This title page carries a revealing outline of the three parts proposed, with the description of the second part alone containing the rather grudging admission: N. B. The Examples in Perspective are intended to exhibit the newest Taste of various Pieces of Furniture, and likewise to shew the necessary Lines for designing them.

Fig. A. Title page of Sheraton’s 1791 prospectus.

Part III of the 1793 edition, reproduced here in its entirety, departs substantially from the original program of 1791, and illustrates only furniture. Many of the plates dated 1791 and 1792 adhere to the idea of showing construction lines and some perspective development, but the majority are simple illustrations, mostly in one-point perspective, often without scales, and totally uninformative as to back-leg profiles, depth of seats, etc. For all Sheraton’s harangues on perspective, his own drawings leave something to be desired in visual correctness and explicitness of dimension.

The 1793 edition also contains an Appendix with plates all dating from 1793. In later editions (1794 and 1802), not only does the tense of the author’s foreword change from the future to a mildly complaining past, but an Accompaniment of fourteen plates dated 1793 and 1794, and a group of eight Additional Plates all dated 1794, are added. Sheraton’s designs through these years are remarkably personal and consistent. It is on the group of plates mentioned in this paragraph, and on this group alone, that the fame of Sheraton the designer rests.

The 1791 title page has Sheraton living at No. 4, Hart-street, Grosvenor-square, while the 1793 edition lists him at No. 41, Davies-street, Grosvenor-square. The Appendix of same year finds him at No. 106, Wardour-street, Soho, which agrees with his trade card of somewhat later date (Figure B), while 8, Broad-street is the location on the title page of his 1803 Cabinet Dictionary. It was at this address, apparently, that he left his family, it is feared, in distressed circumstances, according to the Obituary, with Anecdotes, of Remarkable Persons in the Gentleman’s Magazine for November 1806.

Comparison of dates and places gives eloquent if circumstantial evidence of the exigencies of Sheraton’s sixteen years in London. There is nothing to suggest that his hand ever participated in the production of a piece of furniture, nor that he enjoyed at any time the company or patronage of the affluent or the influential, or indeed experienced anything but abject poverty and loneliness. Our sole biographical memoir is the observation by Adam Black, later a distinguished publisher, who worked with Sheraton for about a week ... writing a few articles, trying to put his house in order, for which I was remunerated with half a guinea. Miserable as the pay was, I was half ashamed to take it from the poor man. Sheraton died only two years later, in October 1806. Probably Black’s few articles were entries in the Cabinet-Maker, Upholsterer and General Artists’ Encyclopaedia, a frenetically ambitious project of which only the A-C folio was completed before the author’s death.

Fig. B. Sheraton’s trade card.

The Drawing-Book, the Cabinet Dictionary and the Cabinet Encyclopaedia, together forming the style of Sheraton, make a picture of the desperate struggle of a troubled, bitter personality to compose a wide range of knowledge and emotion into designs saleable to a convulsively fluctuating, nervously revolutionary society. The stable social base of the early reign of George III had deteriorated into economic insurgency at home, social and political turmoil on the Continent, philosophical and artistic dissension everywhere, as the weak-kneed Regency accommodated itself to all shifting tides. Cross-currents of revolutionary fervor and luxurious excesses materialized in the trappings of ancient imperialism. The instructive Drawing-Book that Sheraton projected was distinctly not an answer to the demand for exciting new designs in furniture. Pedant-preacher-teacher that he was, he must have become disturbingly aware after the publication of the first two parts of the Drawing-Book that his intent may have been somewhat different from the expectations of his subscribers. Complaining in the Introduction to Part III that everybody wanted something new, different and exciting, and that it was impossible to satisfy everybody, Sheraton proceeded to embellish familiar late-Adam basic shapes with the divergent ornamental novelties of a restless period. In one direction, he compounded mechanical trickery, long a delight of Germanic designers like Riesener, Röntgen, Jacob; in another, he discovered the gaudier ornamental vocabulary of the expiring court of Louis XVI. He further stressed the upholsterer’s art as it had not been known in England since the Restoration. Finally he came to the classical animal symbolism which, in the hands of more practically realistic designers like Percier and Fontaine and their apostle Thomas Hope, led successively into the French Empire, the English Empire, the Regency and ultimately the Early Victorian styles. To quote Macquoid (in The Dictionary of English Furniture), Up to the opening of the war with France in 1793, the influence of Robert Adam was barely contested but soon after this date a revolution in taste, a closer and more intense classical revival, was taking place both in England and the Continent. Napoleon’s expeditions to Egypt and Syria, 1798—1801, included archeologists and artists, whose notes produced the Empire mélange of Egyptian and Greco-Roman which, reaching England, swamped the Adam tradition.

A considerable quantity of furniture survives, safely attributable to this period, which more or less, in this or that particular, resembles designs shown in the Drawing-Book. Whether these survivors were the inspiration for Sheraton’s exemplars, or whether they were inspired by the publication, will forever remain a subject for speculation. Even more speculative is the possibility that some of this furniture may actually have been designed by Sheraton. His text is full of hints of his familiarity with the London cabinet trade and industry, and their practices and specialties. By this time the Factory System had completed the divorce of the designer from the craft-production process. Presumably Sheraton served the industry as a free-lance designer, circulating among the cabinet shops of the city, earning his meager living by sporadically selling his services as designer or delineator.

There is little in Sheraton’s published drawings that would today be construed as definitive instruction to a craftsman. For that matter, no existing drawing of the period would now be considered adequately informative for a working drawing. The perfection of line and proportion of most known late Georgian furniture tells of a uniform understanding of these idiomatic details, a quality of vernacular craft-training that made conventions of such details. Assuming that the specialization of operations by this time was so explicit, it probably fell to the lot of one artisan—a foreman or pattern-maker—to detail to a hair the exact dimensions, the thickness of a leg or a molding, the precise sweep of a curve, the depth of carving. Sheraton speaks of the use of the compass to develop dimensions from the drawings, but this procedure would be only a source of clumsy error unless such detailing were guided by exquisite taste and technique. This bolsters the supposition that Sheraton drew what he saw, that he employed familiar details and composed them capriciously into original arrangements. His drawings were thus meant to be schematic or conceptual, with the skill of the working designer to supply the missing minutiae of dimension and shape.

Exported to colonies and neighboring countries, the designs of the late Georgian school were freely adapted to local conventions and skills. There is no way of knowing to what comparative extent the message was carried by exports of books, or of actual furniture models, or by memory, hearsay