An addition to Chippendale's oeuvre

Magazine Antiques, June, 1996 by Anthony Coleridge

I am most grateful to Robin and Brian Kern of Hotspur Limited, my colleague John Hardy, Tessa Murdoch of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Anthea Palmer and Kevin Rogers of the National Trust in London for their help and advice during the preparation of this article.

1 Harewood House Mss Inventories, MS 510, November 12, 1773 (West Yorkshire Archives, Leeds, England).

2 The policy and a copy of the original plan am in the archives of the Sun Insurance Company, London. They are discussed in G. Bernard Hughes, "Thomas Chippendale's Workshops," Country Life, June 14, 1956, pp. 1290-1291.

3 Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, vol. 10 (New Haven, Connecticut, 1941), p. 207.

4 See n. 1.

5 Gilbert wrote to the owners of the secretary on April 22, 1993, "I am confident that the newly discovered lacquer secretary cabinet is the one supplied by Chippendale for the State Bedchamber at Harewood House in 1773...A careful examination leaves no doubt in my mind that this is a fully accredited documented Chippendale masterpiece."

6 A typescript of the inventory is in the furniture and woodwork department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

7 The inventory is in the archives of the National Trust, London.

8 The decoration of the side panels is based on late seventeenth-century designs after John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688).

9 If Chippendale did not make the commodes, the most obvious other candidate would be the Linnells because of their strong connection with Osterley. William Linnell drew up the 1782 inventory and his brother John designed some of the furniture for the house. The firm had made fine japanned furniture in the chinoiserie style during the 1750s, supplying it to Charles Noel Somerset (1709-1756), the fourth duke of Beaufort, for Badminton House in Gloucestershire, and to Sir Nathaniel Curzon (1726-1804), first Lord Scarsdale, for Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, among others. However, as far as I know no lacquered pieces in the neoclassical style by this firm have been identified.

ANTHONY COLERIDGE is the president of Christie's South Kensington in London and the author of Chippendale Furniture, The Work of Thomas Chippendale and his Contemporaries in the Rococo Taste.