Antique Furniture Neo-Classicism

No antique furniture designer was more important or more prolific than Robert Adam (1728-92). Like Stuart and Chambers, Adam had acquired his knowledge of classical design, as well as a wide circle of friendly artists, dilettanti and aristocrats, during his years spent in Italy, and his subsequent employment by many of the most rich and powerful property owners in Britain gave him immense prestige and wide influence. In his all-embracing approach to building schemes (and in partnership with his brother James), he took responsibility for all aspects of interior decoration – the painting of walls and ceilings, stucco-work, furniture, carpets, curtains and lighting – and by so doing gave patronage to some of the best craftsmen of the time. Among the cabinet-makers who collaborated with him were John Linnell, Thomas Chippendale, Ince & Mayhew, Vile & Cobb and Samuel Norman.

In antique furniture light elegance of the Adam style was well suited to the domestic interior and enhanced the skills of the craftsman, giving unprecedented scope for marquetry decoration. The playful asymmetrical flourishes of rococo plasterwork were translated into well-regulated borders of anthemion or paterae, scrolled acanthus, looped garlands and graceful arabesques. Painting and gilding were also widely used, and decorative ceramic plaques as well as finely chiselled ormolu mounts were applied to surfaces veneered in finely-figured mahogany or satinwood.

The style was distilled most successfully in The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide (1788), the posthumously published design book by George Hepplewhite (d 1786), which took the Adam style not only to the furthest corners of the British Isles but to many parts of Europe and North America.
Forty of them were for chairs, most of which had decorated shield or square backs and upholstered seats. Hepplewhite drew attention to the Adam-inspired fashion for “finishing them with painted or japanned work” and “assorting the prevailing colour to the light of the room”.

REGENCY furniture

Regency, as the description of a period of English design, is an imprecise, modern term. Far from being confined to made during the single decade of the historical Regency (1811-20), when the Prince of Wales (later George IV) took over the reins of monarchy from his ailing father George III, it includes produced from about 1790 until the early 1840s.

Design and materials

The two main characteristics of Regency are a strong sense of design and the wide range and high quality of materials that cabinet-makers use.

Antique furniture design is marked by an archaeological approach, a diligent research into all available sources of styles of the past. Material drawn upon ranged from antique marbles to contemporary publications such as Thomas Hope’s Household and Interior Decoration (1807). The result included both accurate reproductions of antique forms and stylisations of them. In the work of an able designer, such as George Bullock, that thus revealed its sources of inspiration from the past was yet, at the same time, distinctly of its own period.

Most produced for the middle classes was not produced by leading cabinet-makers and is therefore less distinguished than the major examples pictured here. Even so, much of it shows great elegance in its use of typical Regency features derived from pattern books, such as sabre legs on chairs, turned or reeded (carved with convex parallel lines) legs on tables and chairs, stylised acanthus and lotus leaf carving and inlaid brass borders. Kitchen and servants’ tended to be made with the emphasis on durability rather than style, but even so it too can have considerable charm.

The principal woods used during the Regency period were mahogany and rosewood. However, the grander early 19th-century pieces were often veneered with rare and exotic woods. Satinwood remained fashionable, as it had been at the end of the 18th century. Amboyna, calamander, ebony and kingwood were also popular, as was zebrawood, although in 1820, according to the novelist Maria Edgeworth, there was “no more of it to be had for love or money”. Where appropriate, embellished with gilt gesso (plaster) mouldings and ormolu (gilt-bronze) and lacquered-brass mounts. Brass inlay was widely used both for inlaid lines and for decorative borders and panels. Also common was painted with landscape vignettes on chair backs. And there was an increased use of the indigenous woods such as oak, elm and yew, not just for country-made pieces but also for sophisticated London-made. A leading exponent of this trend was George Bullock.

Hope’s Household and Interior Decoration (1807), illustrating his pieces is perhaps the most significant collection of designs published during the Regency period and greatly influenced commercial cabinet-makers.

Hope’s exhibits purity of line and appositeness in its use of embellishment – for example, bacchanalian masks on an urn suitable for a dining room and a sleeping greyhound on a day-bed. Hope’s pure style set a standard which few commercial cabinet-makers could follow. One notable exception, however, is the early 19th-century work of Thomas Chippendale the Younger (1749-1822) for Sir Richard Colt Hoare at Stourhead, Wiltshire. This has much of the tension and confidence in design that is associated with Hope’s furniture. For example, the mahogany library chairs, with their low curved backs resting neatly on supports like Egyptian caryatids (carved upright figures) for the front legs, are both original and elegant. Apart from their brass castors, there is no additional embellishment and it is the design and quality of the timber alone which makes them outstanding. Equally fine is the large library desk with free-standing sphinx-head caryatids at the ends and similar pilasters at the sides supporting heads of Greek philosophers.