Sheraton
NAME: Sheraton, Thomas
ACHIEVEMENTS:
One of the greatest furniture designers.
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
1751, Stockton-on-Tees, Durham
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
22 October 1806, London, England. Aged 55
DISCIPLINE:
Furniture designer and author
FIELD:
Furniture design
LANGUAGE:
English
PARENTS:
Father: Thomas Sheraton
Mother: name unknown
SIBLINGS:
Unknown
SPOUSE:
Name unknown
CHILDREN:
2
EDUCATION:
Rudimentary
MAJOR WORK:
“Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book” (1793)
“Cabinet Dictionary” (1803)
LIFE AND TIMES:
When Sheraton arrived in London around 1791 he described himself as a cabinet-maker and his trade card stated that he taught perspective, architecture and ornaments, made designs for cabinet-makers and sold all kinds of drawing books.
In 1791 he began to publish in serial form his “Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book”. It was sold by subscription and most of the subscribers were cabinet-makers based outside London who were probably known to Sheridan from his travels. His aim was to demonstrate contemporary taste in furniture and to show cabinet-makers how to make it.
He was sensitive to fluctuations in taste and in the preface to his “Drawing Book” commented on the outdated style of some of <superseded> Hepplewhite’s* designs. There is controversy about how many of the designs in the book were Sheraton’s own. He was certainly influenced by the work of <influenced by> Adam*, a successful architect and designer who had established his own neo-classical style which became fashionable. Sheraton designed furniture himself, but it was adapted from Adams-inspired furniture.
He also produced designs based on pieces he had seen, and gave credit in his books to other cabinet-makers when he showed their ideas. There is only one piece of furniture definitively attributed to him: a glass-front bookcase.
Sheraton drawings were responsible for the spread of his ideas all over England, in Ireland and in the American colonies. According to Sheraton a good perspective drawing was as useful as a sample of furniture for both customer and cabinet-maker. The last issue of the drawing book came out in 1793, and the first collected edition of “The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book” was published in 1794. A second edition was printed in the same year and a third in 1804.
In 1799 Sheraton moved to Darlington in Yorkshire where he was ordained as a Baptist minister. He returned to London in 1802 and in 1805 he published “The Cabinet Dictionary” in which his taste appears more random and less simply conceived. Writing about drawing room chairs, for example, Sheraton stated that they should always be the “produce of studied elegance”. He developed the square-backed formula for chairs and also the rectangular back for sofas and the plain rectangular shapes for mirrors.
However, by the end of the eighteenth century, Regency taste was imposing on neo-classicism exotic contortions and there was a tendency to embellish basic shapes with ornamental novelties and to include the use of other materials as well as wood. Sheraton increasingly featured designs which involved some mechanical devices, ornamental additions and upholstery.
In writing about the making of the furniture, Sheraton gave clear and explicitly detailed instructions which could be followed by any cabinet-maker. He appears to have anticipated the development of plywood by his suggestion that table tops could be prevented from warping by gluing the wood two ways so that the “spring of the grain” was cut off.
The “Cabinet Dictionary” was unusual for its time in advising not only how to make furniture, but which pieces to buy and how to position them within a house. In an age where a new class of entrepreneurs, bankers and rich agriculturists were making money and setting up home as gentlemen, Sheridan’s book was valuable to the provincial nouveau-riche who wanted to be known for their good taste.
Sheraton continued to write religious tracts and after 1804, began writing “The Cabinet-Maker, Upholsterer’s and General Artist’s Encyclopaedia” but had only reached the letter D when he died in poverty in 1806.
ASSESSMENT: His designs were responsible for the Sheraton style, a term used to describe the elegant neo-classical furniture in mahogany or satinwood made in the late eighteenth-century.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Thomas Sheraton, great 18th-century furniture-maker
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Aronson, Joseph, Introduction to Thomas Sheraton’s “The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book”, Dover Publications Inc., 1972
Cole, Wilfrid P and Montgomery, Charles F, Introduction to Thomas Sheraton’s “Cabinet Dictionary”, Praeger Publishers, London, 1970.