George Hepplewhite
Died London, June 1786.
English furniture designer. Though a household name in the context of late 18th-century furniture, he remains a shadowy figure. Lowndes’s London Directory of 1786 records his business at Redcross Street, Cripplegate, London, and after his death the administration was granted to his widow, Alice, on 27 June 1786. The Public Ledger of 10 October 1786 announced an auction of his stock-in-trade and household furniture. In 1788 his widow published the Cabinet-maker and Upholsterer’s Guide. Its aim was ‘to follow the latest and most prevailing fashion’ and to adhere ‘to such articles only as are of general use’. The intended public included both the cabinetmaker or upholsterer and the client (the ‘mechanic and gentleman’, as Alice Hepplewhite put it). There followed a slightly revised edition in 1789 and an ‘improved’ one in 1794, with an extra plate and revised chair designs. Six engravings bearing Hepplewhite’s name appeared in Thomas Shearer’s Cabinet-makers’ London Book of Prices (1788).
Hepplewhite’s Guide was the first major pattern book of furniture to be published since the third edition of Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet-maker’s Director (1762), excluding those designs in the first two volumes of Works in Architecture (1773–9) by Robert and James Adam. Hepplewhite’s designs most closely compare with Adam’s drawings of the late 1780s, sharing their fashionably attenuated quality of design. The furniture is slender, and most of the decoration inlaid or painted rather than carved. Pier-glasses, for example, have narrow rectangular frames, and the decoration tends to be confined to the crests. Common motifs are sunbursts, paterae, husk chains and fronded scrolls. Hepplewhite favoured shield-shaped and square chair backs, often with the ‘Prince of Wales’s feathers’ motif, but he died before he could assimilate the styles developed at Carlton House (destr.), London, the new residence of the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Hepplewhite was aware of the possibilities offered by gadgetry, a trend that was to grow in the early years of the 19th century, but a more conservative element in his work can be seen in his use of window-stools with curving arms but no backs that were first designed by Robert Adam as early as the 1760s. Decorative figures (humans, nymphs and putti) occasionally feature on chair backs and the crests of pier-glasses. His Guide reflected rather than originated a domestic version of the Adam style that was current during the 1780s, and it was highly influential in North America and northern Europe. It was reprinted in 1897 by Batsford, at a time when 18th-century furniture styles were enjoying a revival. No documented or labelled item of furniture from Hepplewhite’s workshop is known.
James Yorke. "Hepplewhite, George." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T037615 (accessed May 2, 2012).
