NEWS

Fund-raising for the facsimile reprint of the first edition of The Director is almost complete and work has started on scanning all the images prior to printing. We hope to have the book ready by the early summer, possibly in time for the Annual Dinner on 7th June. There is still time to order Subscription copies at £250 each. Ordinary copies will be available after publication at £100 each. More details from the Hon Curator, Temple Newsam House

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

The Annual General Meeting will be held on Wednesday 4th May at 7.30 at The Methodist Church Hall, Otley. All members are welcome
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ANNUAL DINNER

The Annual Dinner will take place on Tuesday 7th June at Otley Golf Club. Professor Brian Allen, Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, has kindly agreed to be the speaker. More details in the next Newsletter.

NEW RESEARCH

Robert Barker, a PhD student at the V&A/RCA researching the rococo style in the Colonies, has come across some interesting new information about The Director in 18th century Jamaica. He has kindly provided us with the following resume of his lecture to the Furniture History Society’s recent Annual Symposium and which he hopes to publish more fully in due course. This complements the forthcoming lecture by David Jones to be held at Nostell Priory on May 9th (see insert).

CHIPPENDALE’S DIRECTOR IN MID EIGHTEENTH CENTURY JAMAICA

Robert B. Barker’s paper on “Chippendale’s ‘Director’ in Mid-Eighteenth Century Jamaica” covered two strands. He explained that one Alexander Spens, of Kingston, “gentleman” had died in Jamaica in October 1755. The latter’s probate inventory shows that he had clothing in keeping with his social status along with a broad selection of woodworking and blacksmiths’ tools. He also owned “a Theodolite with its Apparatus”, “A Case wt. Drawing Instruments”, “Wares Palladio & 4 Books on Architecture & Drawing”, and, “6 Copies of Chippendalis [sic] Designs in Sheets…& Copy Bound”. The speaker suggested that Spens was most probably an architect and house builder. He was the son of Thomas Spens of Lathallan, Fife, Scotland and was the same man as the Alexander Spence referred to in the advertisement in the Edinburgh Caledonian Mercury on 5 April 1753, seeking support for the proposed publication of the ‘Director’, which stated ‘Subscriptions are taken in by the Authors, Alexander Spence and Thomas Chippendale, in Northumberland-Court, Charing-Cross …’. The speaker went on to credit Spens with signing up fourteen subscribers to the ‘Director’, principally a significant cluster in Fife, and suggested that this indicated that Spens had been intimately involved in the production of the ‘Director’, in a role that was not currently clear, but that this involvement was not acknowledged on publication, possibly due to Spens probably following the Roman Catholic faith and his family’s support for the Jacobite cause.

Barker also referred to the carpenter Jonathan Satterthwaite, from Burlington county, New Jersey (close to Philadelphia), who had been in Kingston since 1757, if not before, and died there in 1764, owning an array of woodworking tools, including “163 Chissells and Gouges”, along with a copy of “Chipindales Book of Carving Chairs &c”, suggesting that Satterthwaite was a cabinetmaker and carver. The speaker went on to pose questions including: Given the wealth of the Jamaican colonists, the local availability of mahogany and the presence of a least one carver, might carved mahogany furniture following Chippendale’s designs have been produced in Jamaica from the mid 1750s?