Fireplaces

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

To discover a fireplace surround documented to a commission by someone as renowned as Robert Adam would be astonishing, and the cost, were it to enter the marketplace, would be prohibitive to many. Moreover, countries are making it more and more difficult for overseas buyers to obtain an export license for such historical objects. This can pose difficulties for collectors seeking fireplace surrounds appropriate for the rooms housing their collections.

One resource is the London firm Chesney's, which was the subject of this column in the January 1998 issue. It recently opened a showroom in the Decoration and Design Building in New York City, where it offers reproductions of more than fifty wood, marble, or limestone French and English period chimneypieces. The firm has also released a CD-ROM that enables collectors to select from a wide variety of decorative motifs in order to create a fireplace surround of their own design.

In the eighteenth century in England a number of architectural treatises included designs for chimneypieces. Isaac Ware's Complete Body of Architecture, published in 1756, listed the wide variety of marble then available both domestically and as imports from Italy, Spain, and Egypt. These design books were followed by more specialized publications such as John Crunden's Chimneypiece Makers' Daily Assistant of 1766. The material of preference remained marble, specifically referred to in the Builder's Magazine for 1774: "Siena was common, also the green Anglese kind and green and white Egyptian." A member of Robert Adam's staff, George Richardson, was responsible for the New collection of Chimney Pieces ornamented in the style of the Etruscan, Greek and Roman architecture that was issued in 1781. There it was suggested that painting on marble was a way of adding decorative motifs.

Chesney's craftsmen carve the mantels completely by hand.