Thomas Shearer () was an 18th-century

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

furniture designer and

cabinet-maker A cabinet is a case or cupboard with shelves and/or drawers for storing or displaying items. Some cabinets are stand alone while others are built in to a wall or are attached to it like a medicine cabinet. Cabinets are typically made of wood (s ...

. Shearer was a craftsman and the author of most of the plates in ''The Cabinet Maker's London Book of Prices and Designs of Cabinet Work'', issued in 1788 "for the London Society of Cabinet Makers." The majority of these plates were republished separately as Designs for Household Furniture. They exhibit their author as a man with an eye at once for simplicity of design and delicacy of proportion; some of his pieces possess a dainty and slender elegance which were a high mark in the

history of English furniture English furniture has developed largely in line with styles in the rest of northern Europe, but has been interpreted in a distinctive fashion. There were significant regional differences in style, for example between the North Country and the West ...

. There can be little doubt that Shearer exercised considerable influence over

George Hepplewhite George Hepplewhite (1727? – 21 June 1786) was a cabinetmaker. He is regarded as having been one of the "big three" English furniture makers of the 18th century, along with Thomas Sheraton and Thomas Chippendale. There are no pieces of furnit ...

, with whom there is reason to suppose that he was closely associated, while

Thomas Sheraton Thomas Sheraton (1751 – 22 October 1806) was a furniture designer, one of the "big three" English furniture makers of the 18th century, along with Thomas Chippendale and George Hepplewhite. Sheraton gave his name to a style of furniture characte ...

has recorded his admiration for work which has often been attributed to others. Shearer, in his turn, owes something to the Adam brothers, and something, no doubt, to the stock designs of his predecessors. There is every reason to suppose that he worked at his craft with his own hands and that he was literally a cabinet-maker—so far as we know, he never made chairs. Much of the elegance of Shearer's work is due to his graceful and reticent employment of inlays of satinwood and other foreign woods. But he was as successful in form as in decoration, and no man ever used the curve to better purpose. In Shearer's time the

sideboard A sideboard, also called a buffet, is an item of furniture traditionally used in the dining room for serving food, for displaying serving dishes, and for storage. It usually consists of a set of cabinets, or cupboards, and one or more drawers ...

was in process of evolution; previously it had been a table with drawers, the pedestals and knife-boxes being separate pieces. He would seem to have been first to combine them into the familiar and often beautiful form they took at the end of the 18th century. The combination may have been made before, but his plate seemed to have been the first published document to show it. Shearer, like many of his contemporaries, was much given to devising "harlequin" furniture. According to the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' Eleventh Edition, " was a designer of high merit and real originality, and occupies a distinguished place among the little band of men, often, like himself, ill-educated and obscure of origin, who raised the English cabinet-making of the second half of the 18th century to an illustrious place in artistic history."

References

English furniture designers 18th-century English people Year of birth unknown Year of death unknown English illustrators {{furniture-stub