New Light on Chippendale at Hestercombe House

Abstract

First paragraph: IN HIS PEERLESS monograph on Thomas Chippendale, Christopher Gilbert considered Hestercombe House, Somerset, to have been furnished by the prestigious London cabinet-maker and furniture designer. Other ‘Chippendale houses’, including Blair Castle, Perthshire, Dumfries House, Ayrshire, and Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, retain documentation – bills and letters – to substantiate their status and the provenance of their furniture. Hestercombe’s inclusion in this illustrious group of houses, however, is less certain because the necessary paperwork has not come to light. Its place within the canon, instead, is based upon a highly unusual manuscript design for a pier glass pasted into the first of two Chippendale albums now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fig.1). Moreover, when Gilbert was writing The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale (1978), no furniture related to this design was known to support Chippendale’s involvement at Hestercombe beyond the design. This article revisits Chippendale’s connection with Hestercombe by re-examining the pier glass design and by analysing two eighteenth-century pairs of pier glasses that interpret it.