Chippendale has one unvarying method of treatment for splatted open-backed chairs wherein he differs from his great successor Sheraton. The splat is always joined to the seat, never to a cross-rail. This is the rule for all his ordinary chairs. Those in the Chinese style, in which the whole back is covered with a lattice or fret, need not be considered in this connection, as they practically have no splat at all. In this strong junction of the splat with the seat he is strictly conservative of the Queen Anne and early Georgian forms. In the shape of the splat he also very frequently adheres to the vase or baluster shape which I have before described, though he pierces it with great variety of patterns. Of the same seventy designs for chairs to which I have referred, nine or ten very distinctly recall the Queen Anne shape, in which the broadest part of the splat is in the upper third portion of the back, if we divide into three parts. A good many others approximate to it, and the conclusion therefore is, that neither in this particular, any more than in that of the 'Cupid's bow,' was he an originator.

Where he deserves our great admiration is in his generally sure 'feeling' for the due proportion of the splat to the entire breadth of the chair-back. Many of the early eighteenth-century chairs are by no means happy in that respect. There is too frequently a broad, unpierced splat with a gaping space on each side of it; and each space is bounded by an inadequately thin upright. A proper sense of spacing, that all-important gift to a designer, was certainly one of Chippendale's great merits. We have to look long and closely amongst his chairs for a design which is unsatisfactory in this respect. Most of them are eminently successful in the harmony of the three upright parts which compose the chair-back. For the most part, in these splatted chairs the splat is divided from the side-pieces all the way from top to bottom. The exceptions are in the case of riband-backed chairs, in which the ends of the ribands join the side-pieces at about half-way; and in one or two other instances. The entirely open and empty space on each side of the splat may therefore be set down as another characteristic of Chippendale's manner.

Of that almost invariable shoulder-angle on the uprights of Queen Anne and early Georgian chairs, Chippendale's show but faint traces. If any angle occurs, it is generally close to the seat, and often disguised by scroll or leaf ornament. The uprights of the earlier chairs are often so plain that the shoulder-angle is a very noticeable feature in the design. This feature does not seem to have commended itself to Chippendale, whose chairs are so much more ornamented as not to require a salient point on each side of the back as a constant factor.