A joiner's son from Yorkshire drew 160 pieces of furniture, and a whole style took his name

Born the son of a Yorkshire joiner, he put 160 furniture designs in one book in 1754.

By Made Over Weekend · 3 min read

Thomas Chippendale was born in 1718 in Otley, a small market town just outside Leeds. He was the only child of John and Mary Chippendale. John was a joiner, and he is thought to have taught his son the basics of the trade at home: how to saw, plane and fit wood.

By 1748, at about thirty, Thomas was in London. That year he married Catherine Redshaw and rented a house in Conduit Court, Covent Garden. In 1754 he moved to 60 to 62 St Martin's Lane, and in April of the same year he published the book that made his name.

How it was built

The book was called The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director. Chippendale picked 160 designs and redrew each one carefully as a finished sheet: chairs, library tables, desks, bookcases, beds, frames and clock cases, in what the title page called the Gothic, Chinese and Modern taste. Professional engravers, Matthew Darly and the Müller brothers, cut the copper plates.

The drawings are full of working details: a front view, a plan of the top, a section through a moulding, a scale bar, and often variants, such as two different legs on one design, so a client could choose. Most of those original drawings still survive, split between The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the V&A in London, the Chippendale Society in Leeds and the Yale Center for British Art.

It worked. A second edition followed in 1755 and a bigger third edition in 1762. Within about a year of the first book, his workshop employed 50 cabinet makers, upholsterers and carvers. Later came great houses: furniture for Dumfries House in Scotland in 1759, and from 1767 the long commission at Harewood House near his home town. He died in 1779 and was buried at St Martin in the Fields.

Chippendale did not expect anyone to copy his plates line for line. He encouraged other cabinet makers to adapt them, and they did, across Britain and North America. That is why so many old chairs are called Chippendale chairs, even though most were made in other workshops.

What it teaches a weekend woodworker

The lesson is in the drawings: decide the shape on paper before the saw comes out. For any curved part, a chair leg, a shaped apron, a bracket, draw it full size on a piece of thin plywood or hardboard. Cut it out with a coping saw or jigsaw and smooth the edge with a file and sandpaper until the curve looks right.

That piece is now your template. Lay it on the real board, trace around it with a sharp pencil, cut just outside the line and fair down to it. Four legs traced from one template will match each other far better than four legs drawn by eye. Write the part name on the template and keep it; next time the job starts half done.

So pick something small this weekend, a shelf bracket or a stool with shaped legs. Draw it, make one template, and let the pencil do the thinking before the saw does the cutting.