American Chippendale style chairs

Six American Chippendale style dining table chairs, 19th century.
Mahogany wood. Imitation boa skin upholstery.
Measurements: 99 x 53 x 50 cm.
Set of six chairs inspired by the work of the English cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779), the main representative of the British Rococo style. The chairs repeat models typical of English Rococo, although with a taste for ornamentation that indicates that this is an American design. Thomas Chippendale created a new style of luxury furniture that was widely disseminated, and which perfectly represented the personality of the English Rococo. His designs were also very popular in the mid to late 19th century, giving name to a new style that was cultivated even in the 20th century. This new Chippendale style even gave rise to sub-genres such as Chinese Chippendale, Gothic and Irish Chippendale. The Chippendale style developed from about 1750, and although it began to decline in London around 1765, it was only then that it began to spread outside the capital, and indeed it was to enjoy a great deal of development in outlying centres for the rest of the century. The Chippendale style is composed of rococo features of French origin, Gothic and Chinese elements, mixed, either separately, all together or only two of them. It will therefore be a very varied and heterogeneous style, but nevertheless, with the passage of time, in the recreations of the 19th and 20th centuries, it will be clearly identifiable by elements such as the typical fretworked paddles of the chairs, which we see here. In fact, Chippendale was the creator of the "new pattern" model, a new model of chair that would become the dining chair par excellence, and which is characterised above all by its paddle based on the ribbon backrest.