Chippendale at Harewood House. . - Books about Antiques - Brief Article - book review

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2002 by Alfred May

Hollywood stars, guided through the firmament by their studios, roosted in grand houses that they bought and sold seasonally. They simply had their maids pack their extensive wardrobes and moved out, ashtrays in place, waiting for the next star.

This brings us, improbably to Harewood House in Leeds, England, which was "done" by Thomas Chippendale and after his death in 1779 by his son, also Thomas. The commission was the most lavish Chippendale ever received. It lasted from 1767 to 1797, fueled by the vast inheritance Edwin Lascelles (1713-1795), the first baron of Harewood, received on the death of his father in 1753. Sugar from plantations in Barbados was the source of this wealth, which Lascelles lavished on his house with limitless prodigality.

Like an early Mark Hampton, the Chippendales supplied not only furniture but all the fittings, including looking glasses, carpets, curtains and cornices, and wallpapers for the state rooms, private apartments, guest rooms, billiard and coffee rooms, basement, and servants' quarters. The house itself was a worthy vessel, for there too Lascelles did not stint It was begun in 1759 to the designs of John Care of York and the Scottish architect Robert Adam, fresh from Italy.

What this magnificent set piece looked like at the end of the eighteenth century may only be conjectured, for in the 1840s Henry Lascelles, the third earl of Harewood, commissioned the architect Sir Charles Barry to modernize the house, and later generations have followed suit. The slim volume entitled The Art of Thomas Chippendale Master Furniture Maker, published on the occasion of an exhibition at Harewood in 2000, makes a concerted effort to bring the Chippendale interior to life. It includes a catalogue of the objects on view, both from the house and on loan; and the 1795 inventory of the house. There is a most interesting essay about Chippendale not only as a designer of furniture but as a man who would turn his hand to almost anything related to human shelter. The authors comment: "He offered a complete house furnishing service, undertook repairs, removals, hired out furniture, compiled inventories and was even prepared to direct and furnish funerals for respected customers."

The introduction, by the present earl of Harewood, George Henry Hubert Lascelles, is entitled "Living with Chippendale." In it he recalls an early attempt to refurbish hail chairs that were "covered in what we used to call 'estate paint' (thick brown stuff which looked as if it was designed to withstand the weather)." They began to strip the paint, and the first chair was a great success-all beech wood. However, the second "had arms of two different colours and a seat of a third," so the chairs clearly had to be repainted. On one chair they dabbed samples of all the various colors of the hail ceiling, but "the result looked like a rather unappetising Neapolitan ice cream." Judging it "unsuitably ostentatious" they removed the Lascelles crest--a bear's head on a gilded background-that Chippendale had placed at the center of each chair back. But, as the earl recalls, "when one of us picked up the crest and stuck it back on the soberly painted chair where it had come from, the whole thing fell into place and loo ked great, just [as] I imagine it had looked to Edwin Lascelles."

One of the stars of the collection is the Diana and Minerva commode of 1773, so called for the inlaid roundels representing the goddesses of the hunt and the arts, respectively. Chippendale was clearly proud of this object, which he describes as follows in his bill: "A Very Large rich Commode with exceedingly fine Antique Ornaments curiously inlaid with various fine woods. Drawers at each end and enclosed with foldg.

Doors, with Diana and Minerva and their emblems Curiously inlaid and Engraved, a cupboard in the Middle part with a cove door, a dressing drawer in the Top part, the whole Elegantly executed and Varnished, with many wrought Brass Antique Ornaments finely finished [pound sterling]86." The earl relates that during World War II the commode was used to store "wrapping paper and reconstituted envelopes." More recently he and his wife show visitors "how the little compartments in the top...lift out and then slip slowly back into place as the air is expelled with a gentle sigh." To my mind, this is the ultimate, if posthumous, encomium for a master cabinetmaker.

The state bed was surely Edwin Lascelles's most ostentatious excess, since by 1773, when Chippendale created it, the idea of such a bed was old fashioned. No account of its use, or lack of it, survives, but the bed itself remained in its formal room until Barry "improved" things by creating a corridor behind the room, probably for servants, and so shrinking the bed alcove. The room then became a sitting room for the third countess of Harewood, and the huge bed, now redundant, was dismantled crated, and stored during World War II under the roof of the stable block. It was rediscovered by the late Chippendale scholar Christopher Gilbert in the 1970s, photographed, and stored again, this time in the disused laundry on the estate. A flood caused by vandals nearly mined the bed. The detective story of its restoration to gilded, draped, and tasseled glory is the subject of the last essay.