Thomas Chippendale

Thomas Chippendale was a cabinet maker from Otley in Yorkshire who set up a workshop in Saint Martin’s Lane in London in the 1750s. In 1754 he published The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, the first pattern book given over entirely to furniture, whose designs in the Rococo, Gothic and Chinese tastes were copied across Britain and America, so that his name became a byword for the style. His firm furnished great country houses, often working with Robert Adam in a later Neoclassical manner. Harewood House, Nostell and Dumfries House keep large sets of his documented furniture, and the V&A has examples.