My first advice to anyone starting to collect furniture is not to be in too much of a hurry. I know how easy it is to become obsessed by some attractive piece in the window of your local antique shop, or to get excited when you hear something being knocked down apparently very cheaply at an auction sale. But furniture is not something which can be put away in a cabinet; it has to be lived with all day and every day. So take a good deal of time looking around and weighing things up. Get to know something about woods and how furniture is made, what kinds of dodges fakers get up to, the current values in different places. There isn’t room to tell you all about this here, but at the end I have added a list of larger books which give you more detail. You cannot do better than start your looking with chairs. They play an enormously important part in the appearance of a room, partly because there are usually more of them than any other kind of furniture, and also because they show their styles so conspicuously. People were always making chairs, so they manage to pick up every little variation of fashion and style. For this reason an unhappy marriage, either between the chairs themselves or between them and other pieces of furniture, can thus be often more disturbing than clashes between the larger pieces. On the other hand, because of their great variety, they can, when carefully chosen, act as a bridge and marry larger things together very happily.

Antique Collector MagazineFirst then, a word about styles (and you may find these remarks helpful in looking at other pieces as well as chairs). Remember too, that it is the style we are talking about, not necessarily the dates of pieces.

In Elizabethan days oak was the chief wood, pieces were large and heavy, and usually carved with all kinds of ornament, much of it with an Italian flavour. Great bulbous “melon” or “cup and cover” supports were typical. A great deal of this type of furniture was copied in Victorian days, and this is what you usually find in the shops today in the form of buffets or court cupboards.

In Stuart times, these same styles went on until they were superseded by fashions from the Continent at the time of the Restoration of Charles II. Now walnut became the dominant wood, with a good deal of cane seating and “barley- sugar” turning. In decoration you began to find lacquer, veneering, marquetry and upholstery with lots of bobble fringes. By Queen Anne’s time these foreign influences had been digested and you had a fine restrained, graceful and totally English style which many good judges consider to be the best there ever was. Distinctive features of it were the cabriole leg, said to be named after a goat’s leap, and splat back chairs which were comfortable to sit in. In early Georgian days mahogany came into use because of its strength and better qualities in cabinet-making, and remained the dominant wood for the rest of the century; for styles, rococo, with its flowing asymmetrical curves, and chinoiseries, derived from the Chinese.

This is now the era of Thomas Chippendale (1718-79) who was a cabinet-maker with a large and very successful business, and who published a collection of designs in a famous book. Pieces actually made in his workshop are rare and enormously expensive, so for all practical purposes one uses his name to describe a style with the above- mentioned flowing curves, much carving and other orna. mentation. He also made a great deal of use of the Chinoiserie styles, and gave his name to “Country Chippendale”, pieces made by lesser craftsmen, usually in the provinces, for middle-class homes. This you can still find today at reasonable prices.

George Hepplewhite (d. 1786) was another London cabinet-maker and like the others published a book on his craft. It gave instructions to the craftsmen of the day on the new styles which set in after Chippendale: typical of them were the chairs with backs in shield, oval and heart shapes. Thomas Sheraton (175 – 1806) was a draughtsman and designer whose styles are not often easy to distinguish from Hepplewhite’s, but generally speaking prefer the straight, even severe line and great delicacy of construction.

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