Is it Genuine?: Guide to the Identification of Eighteenth Century English Furniture

Published in hardback in 1971, the author says that he wrote this 156 page illustrated book to help the reader tell whether a pice of furniture he, or she is told is eighteenth-century is so or not, to allow them to recognise those pieces that have been altered, cut down in size, adapted or converted to another use. When this book was published in 1971, W. Crawley states that there was plenty of converted or 'naughty' furniture about; and he reminds us in his introduction to consider how much eighteenth century furniture there can really be given that at the end of the 18th century, there were probably 12.5 million people in Britain, made up of about 2 million families. Of these families, less than 140,000 could have afforded the prices charged by such craftsmen as Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite. So the question that arises at this point is where have the thousands of existing pieces by these masters and their contemporaries come from? Part of the answer lies in the Victorian's taste for creating and buying reproduction furniture; another part of the puzzle is in the 'made' furniture - when a piece is taken to pieces and then reassembled as something else. This process is illustrated in Part Birth of an Antique. But spotting the expertly made-up fake calls for profound knowledge that only years of study of the master cabinet-makers and experience of handling furniture, such as Mr. Crawley has had, can give. There are though, a number of principles and rules of the craft from which the cabinet-makers of the eighteenth century did not depart such that once you are familiarised with these, it will be comparatively easy to tell when a piece is wrong. Mr. Crawley has therefore concentrated on individual types of furniture and less on the main characteristics and identification marks of the famous makers than on what is wrong. The real criteria are how a piece was made and what it was made with