The Extraordinary Thomas Chippendale Carved with Love: The Genius of British Woodwork

In the golden age of British furniture...

..the 18th century...

..one man defined the age - in wood.

He stood for luxury.

Elegance.

The finest furniture ever to come from these isles.

His name? Thomas Chippendale.

He was the best, he was a master at his craft.

You can't beat that.

In this film, we'll see how an enigmatic Yorkshire joiner

escaped his humble roots to conquer fashionable London.

He won favour by bestowing grandeur and taste upon a new moneyed class.

We'll reveal the techniques he mastered...

You know, when we stand in front of this furniture, it's a work of art.

..kept alive by craftsmen today.

Design inspiration is what it was,

by a man who was truly incredible and wonderful.

Through his ground-breaking designs, he became famous

at home in Britain and across the Atlantic.

We will know in 300 years' time, in 1,000 years' time,

we will know Chippendale's name.

Why? Because he's already done 250 years.

And we'll reveal how Chippendale was betrayed

by the very men he'd worked so hard to please...

..ending his days in penury.

But most of all, we'll celebrate his finest creations -

the defining masterpieces of the Georgian age.

Thomas Chippendale's early life has been pieced together

from a few tantalising fragments of information.

We know he was born here,

in the small Yorkshire village of Otley in 1718.

And even though opportunities were limited,

we know Thomas went into his father's trade - carpentry.

Yorkshire was not exactly in the mainstream

of furniture-making at this moment, or the high point of high fashion.

In Chippendale's own milieu, if you like,

there was the vernacular tradition of furniture made from oak,

beautifully made, often, but fairly sturdy, standard things

for which design barely changed from one generation to the next.

Just one, telling object survives

from the Chippendale family firm. This oak chest.

It's simple, robust and it's lasted centuries,

but it's basic, and the joints are clumsy.

A talented and ambitious young man,

Chippendale set his sights on greater things.

And there was only place to go.

London.

The young Chippendale would've been amazed

by this strange, bustling metropolis.

In the mid-18th century,

London was at the heart of a Britain on the rise.

A rapidly expanding empire across the world meant power.

It meant an influx of luxurious, exotic goods

into ports across the nation.

And it meant wealth for merchants, lawyers and shippers.

This moneyed set would come to be known as "the middle classes".

A group Chippendale would have had his eye on.

The mid and late 18th century see this great surge in buying things,

I mean in the material culture.

And that's because whole new groups of people have more money

to spend on pleasure, and money to spend on their surroundings.

And also a far greater sense of their status.

They wanted to buy all the fineries they could afford,

from grand portraits

to fine china.

And there was one thing at the top of their wish-list.

The way you impressed people with your taste was how you dressed

and how you furnished your home.

And of course you furnished your home

with a collection of things, of fine art from abroad, and furniture.

So furniture was the emblem. It was the showpiece of your home.

Chippendale would have noticed that tastes were getting more exotic.

Oak was now seen as old-fashioned.

And there was a new wood on the block - mahogany -

from the Empire's West Indies.

Mahogany as a raw material

had the ability to transform an entire industry.

It's hard but it's not too hard, it's durable, it's strong,

but also, for a carver, it's a wonderful wood to use

because of its capacity to take fine detail, to carve crisply

and to produce a really clean finish.

Chippendale truly mastered this wood,

manipulating it to produce spectacular furniture.

This is one of his earliest chairs.

It's been carved to the most elegant effect.

So exceptional was his skill,

he came to be known as "the high priest of mahogany".

But Chippendale still needed to make a name for himself.

In 1754, he did something completely revolutionary,

establishing him at once as the greatest designer of his day.

It was bold, but it wasn't a piece of furniture.

It was the first ever furniture catalogue.

The Gentleman And Cabinetmaker's Director

contains over 160 of Chippendale's own designs.

Right on the title page it tells you

everything you need to know about what it is and who it's for.

"A large collection of the most elegant

"and useful designs of household furniture."

This catalogue contains everything the fashion-conscious shopper

of the 18th century could possibly want for their home.

From chairs to breakfast tables,

cabinets and fire screens.

In an attempt to attract the most customers,

he included the three major fashions circulating town.

The Modern Style, fresh out of Paris.

Today we'd call it Rococo -

an extravagant confection of curls, swirls and fanciful carving.

The Chinese.

Inspired by an 18th-century passion for the Orient,

adorned with pagodas and make-believe Chinese figures.

And Gothic - a medieval fantasy

that revived patterns from the Middle Ages.

Chippendale was all about creating what the customer wanted,

in whatever style they chose.

He's confident that he can convince all noblemen,

gentleman or others "who will honour me with their commands",

which means everyone who is going to actually commission him,

"that every design in this book can be improved both as to beauty

"and enrichment in the execution of it,

"by their most obedient servant, Thomas Chippendale."

So what he's saying is really quite key,

in that he's saying, not all the designs are perfect,

all you have to do is ask me to make it

and I will guarantee that they will look better.

There is a figure of Mercury at the end of the preface.

And Mercury is the messenger god

and he's also the god of commerce.

Printed on his banner is "colligit ut spargat" -

"collected in order to distribute" -

which is a perfect thing, because that's exactly what this book is.

It's a collection of designs brought together to better distribute it.

No craftsman had ever produced

something that looked so fine, that is so detailed.

But also quite doctrinaire in a way,

laying down rules, orders, perspective, for furniture.

This is something that architects did, but not furniture people.

They were tradesmen, they were craftspeople.

And this is actually a very, very important landmark,

both because it gives everybody else in the trade a model

so that they can use it. It's going to create a style.

Chippendale's style became so popular,

inferior craftsmen started using The Director to make copies.

James Lomax is an expert at spotting the fakes from the fortunes.

Well, the first thing that strikes you, of course,

is the colour.

We find this Chippendale chair is a wonderfully deep, rich colour,

which is what was most admired in the 18th century.

The other, on the other hand, is much lighter

and perhaps not quite so admired at the time.

This has far, far better quality mahogany.

Much denser, much richer, much more expensive.

The carving on this is superb.

It's absolutely as crisp and as sharp as you can make it.

The splendid use of the materials in the cutting of the fronding here

and the leaves, the splendid curvature of the back,

I mean, it's sort of seamless in its wonderful, tactile quality.

You know, the highlights on some of the edges of the carving

make it really sparkle.

This, on the other hand, is terribly flat.

Very little depth to it, really, at all.

And here, all these extra little scrolls for some reason.

And then if you look at the sides, this reed design down here,

really, is just piled on for no particular reason.

He's piled on a bit of Chinoiserie here,

for example, too. Quite unnecessary.

This one just seems so much more confident as well.

When you put the two side by side,

and you look at the curvature of the backs too...

Look at the way this has the most marvellously elegant

curvature to it, just one splendid swoop.

Whereas on this one, we're going down to here,

and suddenly it goes rather straight, and then the curve continues.

Something obviously went wrong!

So, all in all, the two might have a lot of similarities,

but put the two side by side,

and you really begin to see something quite different emerging.

To meet demand for his exquisite furniture,

Thomas set up shop in the fashionable St Martin's Lane.

St Martin's Lane was a great area of furniture makers.

You had all the big names there - Vile, Cobb, Chippendale, Linnell.

So the environment is utterly creative.

You're surrounded by, it's not just furniture makers,

you've got goldsmiths, there are artists, there's sculptors.

People that we would now call the creative industries,

but the 18th-century equivalent of them,

all milling around St Martin's Lane.

It must have been quite a hotspot.

He lived and worked in numbers 60, 61 and 62.

The workshop itself consisted, on the front of St Martin's Lane,

his own dwelling house.

You would then go through an archway, a carriageway,

into the main premises behind, and, amazingly,

you can almost still see that to this day on exactly the same site.

Most of the work would take place in the courtyard beyond that,

which is where the cabinet workshop was,

where the veneering workshop was,

where the carving and the gilding workshops lay

and stores for things like the feathers for the upholstery.

So it was a busy place.

Chippendale could do anything for anybody.

He could even bury you -

we know he had an undertaking department at St Martin's Lane.

And he was supervising the whole operation.

He was in charge of the artistic direction of the business,

he was in charge of quality control

and he was, above all, in charge of design.

Chippendale's production model

is still used in modern furniture making.

This workshop in Dorset makes Chippendale pieces

and it's run by Jonathan Sainsbury.

Up here, we've probably got in excess of maybe 200 different models.

Of which each model contains sometimes 20 or 30 pieces.

I mean, if you look through here, it looks chaos,

but I know where every single one is.

Every little bit of carving, every little bit of flower decoration,

I know where it all is.

This is a classic Chippendale model.

It's just got all the refinements that I really, really like.

It's got this sort of chamfered stretcher, which is lovely

and it's got this decoration running down the leg here.

And then the fineness of the carving with the urns and balustrade

and the sort of sweeping movement there,

they're all absolutely classics of the Chippendale textbook stuff.

Chippendale's workshop hired up to 50 journeymen workers,

each with different specialisms from carvers to joiners and polishers.

I think one of the wonderful things about Chippendale furniture

is that it's just right.

It's hard to put your finger on how

it's just right, but it's kind of just right.

Basically, design inspiration is what it was,

by a man who was truly incredible and wonderful.

To try and to copy it is difficult,

to improve it is pretty much impossible.

Thomas Chippendale had gone from small town joiner

to a leader of furniture design in London.

His success gave him the freedom,

in his 40s, to go back home to Yorkshire.

And Chippendale was determined to show

his Yorkshire patrons just how far he'd come.

Nostell Priory near Wakefield was the home of the Winn family

who made their money through textiles.

Headed by Rowland, a young obsessive collector,

he wanted to make his house the talk of the county.

And he allowed Chippendale's imagination to run riot.

Here you can see the only Chippendale barometer.

A Chippendale chess board.

Even this exquisite doll's house

is rumoured to have been by the hand of the master.

Complete with miniature lords and ladies, tables and chairs.

Chris Blackburn, house manager for the past six years,

knows the secrets of Nostell better than anyone else.

This is one of my favourite pieces in the whole house.

It looks fairly simple,

but it's got lots of lovely things going on inside.

We can pull this drawer out, very carefully.

It's a bit of an old lady, this one.

It's seen a lot of action, this desk.

So we pull the drawer out,

and what we get is a nice baize writing table.

But, in turn, if we pull that back

very slowly,

we find underneath, this mirror.

Lovely slide back there.

And in here would have been a shaving bowl for water.

Inside here,

we have everything a gentleman needs to get ready for his day.

Over here, we've got razors.

There should be six, one for each day of the week.

Except there isn't a seventh.

I'm told that gentleman didn't shave on a Sunday.

These little items over here,

they're receptacles for powders for your wig.

And over here, little boxes.

And this is what sums up Chippendale for me.

This very simple little box.

We don't know what Roland would have kept in here.

Maybe a couple of love letters.

We've got lovely little tiny joints here.

They're wafer thin. You can barely see them, there and there.

They are just connecting this box.

And it still fits beautifully into place.

It really sums up Chippendale's skill.

But Chris's most treasured piece of Chippendale furniture

is even more hidden from prying eyes.

A little surprise behind here. It's lovely.

There we go. This is Chippendale's medal cabinet.

Rowland Winn was a big collector of Roman coins and Roman seals,

and this is his idea

of a high-security cabinet for those treasures.

It's got a lovely little glass door on the front of it which opens out.

And then these beautiful drawers

that sort of grade all the way down

so you can keep all sorts of different-sized objects in there.

We'll just pull one of these drawers out and find the treasures inside.

There we go. Little coins.

Models and seals.

These things were very collectable

and sought after in the 18th century.

Chippendale himself described it in his bill

as a very neat mahogany cabinet,

which I thing just sums it up really nicely.

Very neat and very elegant is what he described it as.

This carving up here is just amazing,

and I just thrill every time I see this.

If you put your hand behind it,

you can see that it's carved all the way through.

I think it's a fantastically made piece.

It's beautifully carved, really simple,

absolutely right for the job,

which I think is where Chippendale was coming from.

He didn't just do fantastic, beautiful things,

they were always right for the job.

So I think it's an amazing piece, and for it to be tucked in,

especially behind this door, made to measure for this door,

I think it's quite fantastic, and still today,

after all these years - knocking on for 240 years - it's still

in perfect condition, the drawers are beautiful. It's great.

But nothing compares to the spectacular, Oriental fantasy

Chippendale created in the Winns' bedroom.

This Chinese suite was completely designed and crafted by Chippendale.

He even provided the wallpaper.

To make the suite look really special, Chippendale went

the extra mile and decorated the surface of the wood so it would look

as lustrous as Oriental lacquer -

through a technique called japanning.

To give this furniture a taste of the East was no mean feat.

First, the specialist japanner would've had to smooth

the surface of the wood by filling the grain

with a combination of chalk and animal glue.

Once you had a smooth surface,

even more chalk and glue would be added

to create these raised sections.

Next comes the paint -

one super-thin layer added after another until it was crisp and even.

Finally, the wood was ready

to undergo its most miraculous transformation.

Dominic Shuster is a professional restorer of japanned furniture.

I'm using a little red lead with some modern artists' oil colours

to mix together to produce a base colour on the raised section,

and that just gives the gold a nice warm colour.

I'm now using an oil size.

Oil size is a glue that after a while goes quite sticky,

and gold powders, gold leaf, will stick only where I've painted it.

The Japanese were very good at doing this with one hair on a brush.

I'm using a slightly modern method of gold leaf on transfer paper.

This, of course, would have been loose leaf in the 18th century.

I can lay the transfer over the size...

..gently brush...

..and the gold will just stick to the detail.

I can wipe off the excess...

..and the gold will only stay where the size is.

The end result is otherworldly -

a taste of the Far East in a Yorkshire house.

If you look closely, imagine those raised figures.

They're not just raised, they're standing out,

they're almost three-dimensional. And the gilding on top of them!

Imagine, someone actually put that on blob by blob,

little dot by dot, and built those up.

Wonderful! And it stands out. It's superb.

It is the most startling of all of them. I mean, vibrant colour.

It must have been a knockout.

Can you imagine walking in?

"Darling, I've got a present for you."

And you open it - "This is your new closet!"

Wow.

But Nostell was almost Chippendale's undoing.

Like many 18th-century gentlemen,

Winn wasn't prompt at paying his bills,

and Chippendale's workshop was starting to run at a loss.

Chippendale's lowly status meant he could only plead for his money.

He wrote to Winn that his debts were so large he,

"could hardly keep himself out of jail".

Chippendale had a wife and growing family to support,

and matters were about to take an even more challenging turn.

In the 18th century, fashions weren't set in stone.

And, by the 1760s, his eclectic style was beginning to look vulgar.

Now the fashion was for classical simplicity.

Gentleman of the day travelled the continent,

on what was called the Grand Tour,

to see the marvels of the ancient world.

They returned espousing the glories of newly excavated sites,

like Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the beauties of classical furniture.

But Chippendale, a lowly craftsman, never had the opportunity

to see such wonders and found himself out of step.

If you do the Grand Tour

as a professional, you got to meet potential clients,

other Englishmen, rich fellows on the Grand Tour,

you will see objects which will inspire you as a designer

and also you get yourself a pedigree.

You're more likely to be employed.

The Scottish architect Robert Adam used his Grand Tour experiences

to promote a fresh style,

which came to be known as neo-classicism.

His designs were all about simple, straight lines

and ancient decoration.

And now, everyone wanted Adam to redesign their homes.

He was able to persuade the aristocracy, the gentry,

to be able to update their taste.

To begin to dispose of all the fripperies of the Chinese

and the French and the Gothic styles

and actually to take on the new classicism,

which he was determined should now become the rule in Britain.

He's the man of the moment.

Everyone wants to get hold of Adam, because he's the man

who can produce the building with the authentic feel of antiquity.

But Adam wasn't a threat to Chippendale - he was his saviour.

Adam realised a skilled cabinet-maker like Chippendale

could come in handy to furnish his interiors.

It was a marriage of convenience,

but together they would create the greatest houses of the 18th century.

Harewood House near York is Chippendale and Adam's masterpiece.

Thomas Chippendale threw himself into this commission,

producing a magnificent array of furniture that took

the St Martin's Lane workshop a staggering 30 years to complete.

He provided everything from the garden benches

to the red curtains in the long gallery,

which are all carved of wood.

Harewood really was probably the most lavish

furniture commission anywhere in Britain at this date.

It was even beyond really what the Royal Family were ordering.

It was the opportunity

for Chippendale to show really what he was capable of.

It is one of the greatest palaces in Europe at this time.

Ever the pragmatist,

Chippendale embraced the restrained neo-classical style,

achieving complete harmony with Adam's architecture.

In the grand entrance hall, the classical motifs on the ceiling

and on the walls are elegantly reflected on the chairs.

The house belonged to the Lascelles family

who had grown wealthy through trade across the Empire.

And, three centuries later, this is still the Lascelles family home.

I think, with historic pieces like this,

you admire them, you respect them, you look after them well.

But we try to make the house and what's in it as alive as possible.

Not like a museum, in which you're one side of things,

and the precious stuff is somewhere else over there at arm's length.

The furniture in this room, the library, we were very used to it.

It's what you sat on

and tried not to bounce up and down too vigorously on.

This was and still is very much a family room,

still occasionally used for family gatherings at Christmas,

so they're just used as a suite of furniture in a room that you use.

People sit, kids climb on them,

you try to stop people spilling sticky drinks onto them.

From that point of view,

when this room is in full swing, it's used like any other room.

Like any other family in any other room.

The showpiece of the house and of Chippendale's career

is the Diana and Minerva Commode.

It's an elaborate neo-classical cabinet

which depicts Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting,

and, appropriately, Minerva, goddess of craft.

This imagery was created using the expensive technique of marquetry.

Marquetry was a way of seamlessly piecing together

thousands of tiny slivers of wood called veneers.

Chippendale covered this mahogany cabinet

with six different types of wood veneer,

including satinwood, tulipwood, purple heart and ebony.

The Diana and Minerva Commode

is one of the most astonishing pieces of furniture.

Not only in terms of its design,

but also, of course, the quality of the craftsmanship.

It's like a mini piece of architecture in a way,

with its pilasters, its frieze

and the cove in the centre, which suggests an arch.

And also the wonderful way that it curves at the side.

That's, of course, intended so that the curtains can be drawn back

so they wouldn't be all ruched up.

The wonderful use of the different timbers. If you look, for example,

at the figures of Diana and of Minerva, Diana in particular,

look at the shading which we have there on the ivory

which is offset against the ebony.

It has wonderful details, which are an astonishing thing to see.

Jack Metcalfe is one of the few people in Britain

still practising marquetry.

He's been studying the commode for almost 10 years.

Round about 1994, '95, we went to Harewood House,

and that just blew my mind away.

I'd never seen anything as beautiful.

And I realised then that I needed to study that work.

Thomas Chippendale was a superb designer, first and foremost.

His designs were far superior to any of his rivals.

He was a hands-on man as well.

Jack is now recreating elements of the Diana and Minerva Commode

using Chippendale's original techniques.

Here you can see I've drawn the fan out on a template,

and what I want to do here now

is start the first process of the artwork,

by making a dark line against one edge of this fan

and using this hot sand.

It's a technique we call sand shading.

This sand is called silver sand.

It has to be silver sand, it's a very gritty sand,

and because of that,

it will not stick to the veneer when I dip it in there.

And you can see there how quickly it's singed and burned the edge.

It will turn the effect as though

the flutes of the fan look three-dimensional.

So what I want to do now is to lay them onto this template

one piece at a time using some veneer tape.

In the 18th century, Chippendale would have just used

a piece of paper with some animal glue brushed on with his finger.

All I do is lick this paper and hold it in place.

I can then line the ruler up and cut through.

And that's the first flute installed.

I've got all eight flutes now,

and you can see there, if I turn it over,

you won't get the 3D image yet, but you can see where I'm trying

to get some areas of sand shading and darkening along the edge.

And so now we need to produce

what I call the scallops at the end of each flute.

I can draw round the template.

And now what I want to do is to border it with a white veneer,

and then I'll fret-saw the two at once as I go round these scallops.

This is a saw that we call a treadle saw,

and it's a replica of one that we think would have been

used by Thomas Chippendale in the 18th century.

And all it consists of is me using my foot on a treadle

to pull down this rectangular frame

which is made out of aluminium,

and above me, there's a return lathe of wood

which acts like a return spring.

There we are. And if we take off the fan,

discard the background, as I don't need it,

there's the back of the fan already now, sawn with its eight scallops.

The method of cutting and sand shading

is used all over the commode to stunning effect.

And Jack's research has revealed something quite surprising.

Rather than the now faded honeyed shades of brown we see today,

each veneer would have been dyed

with up to 15 different vibrant colours.

You can see now that the fan has been laid

onto the backboard,

and the rest of the motifs have all been added as well.

What we need to look at now is

how this is transformed when polish is applied.

I haven't time to polish it,

but what I can do here is cover this cloth with some neat alcohol.

And this will be the base for the French polish that will be

going on, and here is where you see the transformation take place.

And there you can see the change of colours.

Harewood was the highpoint of Chippendale's career.

But grand houses like this were to be his final undoing.

Just like at Nostell, bills were left unpaid.

Chippendale was owed the unprecedented sum of £10,000.

He had paid for the labour and materials out of his own pocket,

only to find, once again, that the lord of the manor

was reluctant to pay up.

In the 18th century,

grand clients felt they didn't necessarily have to pay on the nail.

And at Harewood, for example,

it was 10 years before the first bill was actually paid.

£7,000. Which was a huge amount of credit.

And, of course, it's always the case -

the richest man in England has the best credit.

So, of course, Chippendale had to put up with this.

Harewood was to be Chippendale's last major project.

He died in his early 60s.

Chippendale left no money, just £28 worth of furniture

and a struggling workshop to his family.

His grave, in sight of his workshop

in the St Martin-in-the-Fields churchyard,

is now lost.

It was built over,

trampled by other artistic titans, under the National Gallery.

However, the story doesn't end there,

because 3,000 miles away,

in America, The Director enabled Chippendale to live on.

This is Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

It recreates life as it would have been

in the 18th-century British colony.

The people who lived in this new and untamed land

were desperate for a taste of British Chippendale-style elegance.

And there's a museum here full of 18th-century American furniture

made to Director designs...

..that would have decorated the homes

of figures like George Washington.

The Chippendale style in the 18th century in America

was seen as an English style.

The people in America

in the late colonial period thought of themselves as British.

And so they saw London as centre of the fashion world.

In each of the different colonies along the seaboard,

it was interpreted in a different way.

For example, in the Philadelphia area, Chippendale's designs

are very florid and very richly carved.

Whereas in Virginia, the cabinet-makers here

and the householders ordering the furniture tend to take

a plainer, neater, less ornamental style.

Williamsburg even has an 18th-century furniture workshop,

making Chippendale designs

and using only the tools that would've been available to him.

Master craftsman Mack Headley

is creating a Chippendale-style candle stand.

We're working on a project

replicating a pair of four-foot-tall candle stands

that George Washington had made for Mount Vernon for his dining room,

they believe, a design done by Thomas Chippendale.

Working with the grain of the wood,

I've got the outline of my design.

That gives me break points

where I can then begin to remove material.

It's pretty satisfying when it comes together.

The Director, originally written

to entice 18th-century Londoners, was now a global phenomenon.

Thomas Jefferson had a copy in America.

So too did Catherine the Great at the Hermitage in Russia.

And Louis XVI in the Palace of Versailles.

What Chippendale did with The Director was truly remarkable.

He created the first international brand.

In a way, The Director was the lifestyle catalogue of his day.

He set off something which ended up in the Habitat catalogue,

in the IKEA catalogue.

He produced something which celebrated his work.

Chippendale was one of the first to make the idea

of a brand, for furniture, especially,

which could be copied, could be understood

and recognised by many people.

At its strongest, a brand is something that turns

base metal into gold, or raw wood into Chippendale furniture.

Something that transcends the individual maker.

Chippendale's designs still pop up in the strangest places,

from skyscrapers to stamps

and, of course, in modern chair design.

In Scotland, the next generation of furniture makers

still find Chippendale's legacy inspirational.

And the market for hand-crafted furniture is enjoying a revival.

The ethos of the school is to have students

coming from around the world to here to learn about Chippendale

but to learn what Chippendale would be doing today.

He would be making new, exciting, vibrant furniture,

which is what he was doing at that time.

The students here are keeping Chippendale's skills alive

through their work, from heavy planing to delicate gilding.

If you ask anyone in the street, Chippendale,

his name is right out there.

It's the one name that people have always heard.

For all his fame, and all the copies,

the furniture made by Chippendale himself is incredibly rare.

And any piece is worth serious money.

Sales are not common, but when they happen, records are smashed.

In 2010, the Harrington commode,

attributed to Chippendale, became the most expensive

piece of English furniture sold at auction.

It's very rare for, extremely rare

for a piece of provenanced, documented furniture

by Thomas Chippendale to appear on the market.

But we don't know yet how many more there may be.

Back in 1924, I think there were only 14 clients known.

And in 1968, we'd still only discovered another 12 or so.

Now we know there are 68.

Now, that accounts for 700 pieces of Chippendale furniture.

There might be another house somewhere.

One such property hit the market in 2007

when the contents of Dumfries House in west Scotland came up for sale.

It was a perfectly preserved time capsule

full of pristine Chippendale furniture.

Christie's auction house produced this double-volume catalogue,

containing every piece in the house...

..at eye-watering prices.

But this furniture was never sold.

The collection was dramatically saved at the 11th hour

by the Prince of Wales,

who helped to find the £45 million needed to save it.

Charlotte Rostek looks after this furniture today.

It's as perfect as when it was first made,

and each piece carries a hefty price tag.

You know, when we stand in front of this furniture, it's a work of art.

They're priceless. If you just think of the price ticket

that this bookcase had when it was prepared for auction,

it was set to go between two to four million, but experts thought

it would have gone for much, much more money than that.

Keys.

This just shows you how close we came

to lose this bookcase to an auction.

Number 40 in the catalogue.

And we have these side doors here.

I'm just going to pull those open gently.

We don't open these very often,

and in fact I don't think these have been opened very often throughout

its entire life, because, if you look, it's absolutely immaculate.

Indeed, sometimes when we show this to people

they can't quite believe that these are the original handles,

because they look spanking new.

And, of course, it also still works.

It pulls out as though it was made yesterday. Absolutely amazing.

And we want to keep it that way for at least another 250 years.

The longer one works with it, and, you know, talking about it

and observing it and explaining it to people, you really almost

develop a relationship with it. And in some cases, it's almost,

I would say, a sensual relationship

because of all these wonderful curves.

And I do have the privilege

of moving and touching and sometimes stroking it.

It's...amazing, and you really get under its skin.

I can only say that if there was one of those things from Dumfries,

any of those things being sold, had come up for auction,

whatever it made wouldn't have been enough.

It would not have been enough.

Suddenly, it's not a wardrobe or a clothes press,

it's something by Chippendale

and of that quality and that stature that makes it important

as well as just wonderful.

I mean, you just sit there and look at it.

No recession in English furniture would have any connection

with Thomas Chippendale any more than...say there were

a recession or a dip in the British landscape market

would have to do with Constable.

It would be totally unaffected.

They are miles apart, worlds apart.

And the market for the best has always, always been maintained.

And he was the best. He was a master at his craft. You can't beat that.

We have the name of Chippendale and what it embodies.

It embodies Englishness, it embodies a notion of excellence

and it embodies a style which everybody recognises.

Quite apart from being objects of design,

these are little works of art in their own right.

We will know in 300 years' time,

in 1,000 years' time, we will know Chippendale's name.

Why? Because he's already done 250 years.

In the next episode...

from the ashes of the Fire of London

emerged our greatest ever woodcarver.

Grinling Gibbons decorated the finest buildings in Britain

and transformed wood into pure art.

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