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See also: English 18th-century furniture designer and See also: cabinet-maker
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The solitary See also: biographical fact we possess See also: relating to this distinguished craftsman is that he was the author of most of the plates in The Cabinet Maker's See also: London See also: Book of Prices and Designs of Cabinet See also: Work, issued in 1788 " For the London Society of Cabinet Makers." The majority of these plates were republished separately as Designs for See also: Household Furniture
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They exhibit their author as a See also: man with an See also: eye at once for simplicity of design and delicacy of proportion
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Indeed some of his pieces possess a dainty and slender elegance which has never been surpassed in the See also: history of English furniture
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There can be little doubt that See also: Shearer exercised considerable influence over See also: Hepplewhite, with whom there is reason to suppose that he was closely associated, while See also: Sheraton has recorded his admiration for work which has often been attributed to others
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Shearer, in his turn, owes something to the See also: brothers See also: Adam, and something no doubt, to the stock designs of his predecessors
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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
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Much of the elegance of Shearer's work is due to his graceful and reticent employment of inlays of satinwood and other See also: foreign woods
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But he was as successful in See also: form as in decoration, and no man ever used the See also: curve to better purpose
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In Shearer's See also: time the See also: sideboard was in See also: process of See also: evolution; previously it had been a table with drawers, the pedestals and knife-boxes being See also: separate pieces
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He would seem to have been first to combine them into the See also: familiar and often beautiful form they took at the end of the 18th century
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The combination may have been made before, but his See also: plate is, in point of time, the first published document to show it
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Shearer, like many of his contemporaries, was much given to devising " See also: harlequin " furniture
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He was a designer of high merit and real originality, and occupies a distinguished place among the little See also: band of men, often, like himself, See also: ill-educated and obscure of origin, who raised the English cabinet-making of the second See also: half of the 18th century to an illustrious place in See also: artistic history
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