Thomas Shearer

Of all the lesser lights in the furniture world of the eighteenth century Thomas Shearer seems the most entitled to our respect and admiration. He was the contemporary of Hepplewhite and Sheraton and a coworker with the former. The Society of London Cabinet-Makers made a really valuable contribution to the mobiliary literature of the eighteenth century in the Cabinet-Maker's Booh of Prices which they first published in 1788. For the plates of designs in this book three members of the Society were responsible - Shearer, Hepplewhite and Casement. Shearer contributed twenty plates, Hepplewhite seven, and Casement, of whom we know nothing else, was responsible for two.

Shearer's work had many points of strong similarity to both Hepplewhite's and Sheraton's, and the latter, despite his acetic disposition and his habit of speaking disparagingly of both his contemporaries and predecessors, professed honest admiration for Shearer's designs and proved the sincerity of his admiration by adapting and improving them.

The general characteristics of Shearer's furniture are so similar to the salient points in that of his two great contemporaries that any rehearsal of them would mean merely useless repetition. Shearer in one respect, however, stands clearly forth as the leader whom both followed. He it was who began the development that resulted in the graceful sideboards that undiscriminat-ing posterity almost universally attributes to one or the other of the greater designers. Before Hepplewhite made his beautiful inlaid sideboards with serpentine fronts and tapered legs, Shearer had not only-evolved but fully developed the main portion of the type and had produced or designed sideboards of this pattern that compared favourably with anything that Hepplewhite or Sheraton produced later so far as contour and proportions were concerned, although in the introduction of sundry ingenious contrivances Sheraton carried sideboard-making a step farther than it had ever reached before.

SHEARER INLAID MAHOGANY SIDEBOARD WITH FLUTED AND QUILLED LEGS.

By Courtesy of Miss Sarah Dobson Fiske, Philadelphia.

HEAVY IN PROPORTIONS AND PROBABLY TO BE ATTRIBUTED TO SHEARER.

By Courtesy of Messrs. Maple & Company, Tottenham Court Road, London.

PLATE XXXVII.

In all of Shearer's furniture he displayed great ingenuity of contrivance and structural knowledge. The only point in which his work occasionally suffers by comparison with Hepplewhite's or Sheraton's is in delicacy and grace of line. If he had been a man of broader education and more insistent enterprise, his name would doubtless have been as well known to posterity as the names of either of the others.