Washington Mews Books
2 total works
As the specialist who introduced the first scientific methods for determining the specific origin of Regency furniture masterpieces, F. Lewis Hinckley argues here that no secondary metropolitan furniture centres existed in England. In his view, therefore, the finely designed and executed British masterpieces must have been produced either in London, the second largest European capital, or in the more centrally located sister capital of Dublin, the persistently overlooked third largest metropolis of the western world. Evidence to support the author's viewpoint lies in the 105 photographs culled from professional antique sources, demonstrating the imaginative design skills expressed in some of the most prestigious pieces of the Regency period.
Except for a relatively small number of London productions made for British royalty and aristocracy, all other fine Queen Anne and Georgian masterpieces have tended to be misrepresented as English ever since the collecting of such antiques came into vogue toward the end of the nineteenth century. The actual origin of hundreds of outstanding pieces exhibited as English in leading British and American museums today was Dublin, an error the lifelong research of F. Lewis Hinckley has done much to rectify. High-quality Dublin pieces began to cross the Atlantic after 1903, when Daniel Farr, owner of a highly successful antique shop in New York City, began finding these items on the London market. When English antique dealers followed the Americans into the Dublin market a panorama of distinctive Dublin seat furniture, cabinetwork and looking glasses was soon recognized.