ABSTRACT
In his eighteenth-century treatise on the art of cabinet-making, Thomas Chippendale included several practical offerings on the derivation of the column orders and the good use of perspective drawing in what was a surprising slippage between architecture and the decorative arts. Architecture, he wrote, was ‘the very Soul and Basis of the Art [of cabinet-making]’, and, although architecture was still clearly distinguished from the craft of domestic furnishings, architectural theory was beginning to be captured and applied in new ways (Chippendale 1754: preface, 1). A generation later, in a handbook by Thomas Sheraton, knowledge of architecture had become fully integrated into the theory of furniture-making, and drawings of chairs, buildings and architectural mouldings were commonly juxtaposed within a single didactic engraving (Sheraton 1802: 309, 321; Figure 1).
