Thomas Sheraton's trade card offered his services as delineator and designer. In this capacity he began to publish The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing-Book in 1791. With additions and alterations it reached completed form in 1794. In the process it changed from a wordy treatise on mechanical drawing, perspective, and orthographic projection to an exemplar of furniture design. Indeed, by its masterful selection of the best of the Late Adam Classical Revival, it epitomized in textbook style the range and taste in English furniture in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The examples advanced from the Hepplewhite choices of only a few years earlier, adding decorative elegance and the restrained richness of ornament inspired by acute observation of the contemporary style of Louis XVI.
This Dover edition is essentially the furniture sourcebook of the Drawing-Book, a grand résumé of the noblest themes of the Classical Revival as inspired by the Brothers Adam and rendered into furniture by countless cabinetmakers, craftsmen, and artists who served one of history’s most self-consciously opulent societies.