Both a style and a man. Thomas Chippendale’s 1754 pattern book, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, gathered Georgian, Rococo, Gothic, and Chinese motifs into a single vocabulary and put it into the hands of cabinetmakers on both sides of the Atlantic. Philadelphia became the great American center for the style, while the Townsend and Goddard shops of Newport gave it the block-and-shell.
Design Elements
- Deep carving
- Chinese-style latticework and lacquer
- Gothic pointed arches
- Broken and open pediments
- Quatrefoils and fretwork legs
- Carved shells, ribbons, and acanthus leaves
- The ball-and-claw foot
- Mahogany almost exclusively, in solids with few veneers