Of the antique furniture-making trade's many specialisms and subcategories, which in the eighteenth century ranged from upholsterers and carvers to chair- and bedstead-making, one of the most ''aristocratic'' and respected areas of the profession was the craft of the cabinet-maker. Adept at uniting form, function, spatial ingenuity and highly expensive and laboriously-cut timbers and veneers, the cabinet-maker emerged as the most reveered specialist of the profession during the century.

From the late medieval period up until the 1720s, oak was the dominant timber used in furniture construction in England. The rise of the English furniture industry during these years concurred with the growth of the wool trade; sheep farming spread rapidly, and pastures for grazing were extended further and further across the landscape. They steadily ate into the ancient forests of Dean, Sherwood, Arden, and Epping, to name but a few, and brought about the felling of huge numbers of trees. Giant oaks, a sight all too rare in this day and age, littered the landscape, and found use in furniture construction.

Our understanding of antique Regency furniture (c.1800-1835) stems from a handful of surviving houses and their interiors, the most famous of which is Brighton Pavilion, constructed for the Prince Regent from 1787 and finished by John Nash between 1815 and 1822.

George Hepplewhite is the most enigmatic of the triumvirate of famous Georgian furniture designers (Chippendale and Sheraton being the others). Despite there being no known pieces of furniture by Hepplewhite's hand his fame stems from the posthomous publication of The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide in 1788, 2 years after his death in 1786.

Animals have always held a fundamental position in the development of cultures. Whether they constitute our food, our companions, or our deities, we have represented them in images for thousands of years.

For this (rather extended) entry, I have chosen to discuss the humble chair; a necessity of design and civilisation, and the most comonplace piece of furniture in any home. It is an object that has provided us with service for thousands of years, raising us up from the ground and away from the dirt. It has also traditionally been used in visual culture to identify the king among his court; from the great seated Pharoahs guarding the temple of Rameses II, to the throne of Solomon and our own Coronation throne at Westminster, and from medieval manuscript illumination to Ingre's portrait of the necessarily seated Napoleon.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Neoclassical movement in art and design had fully permeated society. Its culmination came with the profuse artistic patronage of the then prince regent, George IV, between the years 1811 and 1820. The epicentre of what we now call the Regency period occurred during these nine formative years, though as we shall see it continued well beyond this period. It was a time of great innovation and luxurious creation, and the prince regent sparked a new trend in furniture design that took influence from France (where the Directoire style had in turn taken cue from Classical sources), the Far East, Egypt and the Moorish and Indo-Saracenic cultures with whom the English were trading.

A look at Neoclassicism in English furniture design.