Drawing for three chairs

This is the original drawing for plate XII of the 1754 Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director and re-published as plate XIIII of the third edition of 1762. The left-hand design, the most frequently executed of Chippendale's chair patterns, was also repeated on plate XIII in 1762, engraved by Isaac Taylor. Chippendale described these chairs in his prefatory remarks in the 1754 Director, together with those illustrated on plates XIII, XIV and XV, as ‘a variety of new-pattern Chairs, which, if executed according to their Designs, and by a skilled workman, will have a very good effect. The fore feet are all different for your better choice. If you think they are too much ornamented, that can be omitted at pleasure…'. The prefatory remarks for the 1762 edition were different and more concerned with their upholstery. They were no longer ‘new-pattern Chairs', but ‘…various designs of Chairs for Patterns. The front feet are mostly different, for the greater choice. Care must be taken in drawing them at large… They are usually covered with the same Stuff as the Window-Curtains'. The drawing is inscribed top left ‘No 12' and bottom right ‘3'. It was extracted at an unknown date from the albums of original Chippendale drawings now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It has been dismounted from the numbered leaf of blue wove paper with which it was cut from the album.

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