Chippendale

Thomas Chippendale was born in 1718 and there will be a selection of exhibitions celebrating his 300 years. The Met in NY has an exhibition called Chippendale’s ‘Director’: The Designs and Legacy of a Furniture Maker which runs through Jan, 27, 2019. Should I attend another AAA annual conference and Art Law Day, getting tot he Met for the Chippendale exhibit would make for a great visit to NYC.

The NY Times reports on the Chippendale tercentenary

It was a precursor of the Ikea catalog. Customers could browse, select a design and then order a piece of furniture.

First issued in 1754, “The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director” was illustrated with 160 engraved plates of “the Most Elegant and Useful Designs of Household Furniture in the Gothic, Chinese and Modern Tastes.” It proved to be a marketing masterstroke for its publisher, the British furniture maker Thomas Chippendale, whose birth in 1718 is being celebrated with a raft of tercentenary events this year.

Unlike Ikea’s catalogs, the “Director,” of course, was not aimed at the mass consumer. The first edition was funded by 308 subscribers, most of whom were fellow trade professionals wanting to keep up with the latest styles. Just 49 subscribers were members of the nobility or gentry who would have had the wealth to buy pieces from Chippendale’s London workshop.

The “Director” catalog had “multiple functions,” according to Femke Speelberg, co-curator of the exhibition, “Chippendale’s ‘Director’: The Designs and Legacy of a Furniture Maker,” which is on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through Jan. 27, 2019. The exhibition features a selection of the more than 200 original Chippendale drawings owned by the museum. “It was advertising for the Chippendale firm,” Ms. Speelberg said about the catalog. “It directed the tastes of the gentleman classes. And it was a source of inspiration for design more broadly.”

The Victoria and Albert Museum, Britain’s premier collection devoted to decorative arts, has not marked the tercentenary of Chippendale’s birth with an exhibition. Instead, it has been left to the Chippendale Society in Yorkshire, the part of northern England where the furniture maker was born, to coordinate a calendar of “Chippendale 300” events at regional museums and country houses. “The name doesn’t mean that much to people anymore,” said Adam Bowett, chairman of the society. “We wanted to extend awareness and appreciation of his work.”

Part of the problem is that though Chippendale was — according to Ms. Speelberg of the Met — “the first cabinet maker to have a comprehensive style named after him,” many find it difficult to identify that style nowadays. The popularity of the “Director” encouraged a host of imitators. And because 18th-century English makers, unlike their French counterparts, did not necessarily sign furniture, it can be difficult to verify original pieces from the Chippendale workshop. Mr. Bowett said that so far more than 800 pieces had been securely attributed.

And then there is the “brown furniture” problem. Generally speaking, English 18th-century furniture has fallen out of collecting fashion, giving way to a more minimal, contemporary look.

“The going has got harder,” said Simon Phillips, director of the London dealership Ronald Phillips and one of the three co-founders of the Masterpiece fair in the British capital. “Most people don’t want to live like their grandparents,” he added. “They don’t want to be surrounded by clutter.”

Mr. Phillips said he had been looking to the Chippendale tercentenary to re-energize the top end of the English furniture market. His gallery in the Mayfair district is currently hosting a comprehensive selling exhibition of 38 Chippendale pieces.

Those include a recently discovered gilded wood mirror in the neo-Classical style, from about 1785, one of four supplied by Chippendale to a stately home in Yorkshire, and a mahogany rococo armchair that exactly corresponds to a design in the 1762 third edition of the “Director.” The mirror is priced at 850,000 pounds, or about $1.1 million; the armchair at £265,000.

“I think the prices are too low,” Mr. Phillips said. “When you consider they’re the best of the best of English furniture, they’re a giveaway compared to certain paintings,” he added, without mentioning any names.

Mr. Phillips said on Wednesday that he had sold 12 pieces from his Chippendale show so far, priced from £30,000 to about £700,000.

Current price levels were put into perspective this month at the “Thomas Chippendale: 300 Years” auction at Christie’s in London.

In 1991, at a landmark sale of the Messer Collection of English furniture at the same auction house, a mahogany and ebony-inlaid commode made in the neo-Classical style by Chippendale for his fellow Yorkshireman, Rowland Wynne, fetched £935,000, an auction high for the maker. That year, the English furniture department of Christie’s had a higher turnover than its Impressionist and modern-art department.

The commode reappeared, among 20 select pieces, in the Chippendale tercentenary sale on July 5 at Christie’s. This time round, it was estimated at £3 million to £5 million, reflecting the £3.8 million achieved for another Chippendale commode at Sotheby’s in 2010.

Despite extensive marketing in Asia, it failed to sell, as did two Chippendale gilded wood sofas, each with a low estimate of £2 million. The sofas did at least sell privately after the auction — as a pair, for an undisclosed price.

All the other lots in the auction found buyers, and the sale achieved a relatively modest total of £3.3 million.

“You need a flow of masterpieces to underpin prices, and great things just haven’t appeared on the market in the last few years,” said Orlando Rock, co-chairman of decorative arts for Christie’s. “Chippendale is a distinct brand. We need to inspire people.”

Mr. Rock acknowledged that the Chippendale market would have been transformed if a proposed 2007 auction of the contents of Dumfries House in Ayrshire, Scotland, had gone ahead. The house contains a unique trove of about 60 fully documented rococo pieces that the fifth Earl of Dumfries bought in the late 1750s. They were to be sold at Christie’s, but at the 11th hour, the house, contents and estate were acquired by a consortium of charities and heritage bodies led by Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.

Dumfries House is now open to the public and is holding monthly talks from visiting scholars as part of the “Chippendale 300” celebrations.

Janet Casey, curator at Dumfries House, said the collection was “the largest authenticated group of early Chippendale pieces.”

“And they’ve all come directly from the workshop,” she added. “It’s an unbroken chain.”

Retaining the Dumfries House collection and rejuvenating its estate have been credited with helping the local economy regenerate.

Yet the fact remains that, internationally, the Chippendale name no longer has such a stellar status. If it did, the museum-quality pieces that have been offered this year would easily have found buyers at levels routinely paid for lesser-quality Picasso paintings.

Maybe purveyors of Chippendale furniture should make more of celebrity endorsements. On July 16, for example, official photographs for the British royal family of the christening of Prince Louis showed the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge seated with their baby son in Clarence House on a gilded wood sofa dating from about 1775.

The Chippendale sofa “tied in beautifully with the lavish blue and bronze patterned 18th-century Axminster rug,” said Hello, a glossy British magazine focused on celebrity and royal gossip.

Now that is something the trailblazing publisher of the “Director” would have appreciated.

Source: The NY Times 

---