Chippendale owed more than most people imagine to Marot. _Le style chinois_ is to be found, so to speak, in embryo, in Marot's design books, and suggestions of it appear in some of his executed work. The un-English marquetry became acclimatized, and later, as we shall show, the equally un-English lac became a fashion. =Derivative Nature of Marquetry Clock-cases.=--The laying of marquetry as a craft is one thing, the conception of marquetry as a creative art is another. We may admire the dexterity of the inlay but deplore the design. At the Mortlake tapestry works Vandyck and Rubens made drawings for the craftsmen. In England, whenever the craftsman has been allied with the artist he has produced great results; whenever he has run alone he has rapidly run downhill. Josiah Wedgwood had on the one side Bentley the classical scholar, on the other Flaxman the artist and modeller with a perfect continental training. Chippendale, great craftsman that he was, would have been better advised to prune his Chinese taste and discard his worthless Gothic style. An artistic brain behind him would have saved him from such atrocities. Sheraton, more the artist than the craftsman, made no such blunders. Evidently the making of clock-cases became an industry. Personally we incline to the belief that seventy-five per cent. of them were of foreign manufacture, either in Holland and imported here, or made by Dutch immigrants or French refugees in this country. The derivative nature of their design tells its own story. It has nothing English about it. Take the early geometric star pattern or the early coloured birds and flowers, what else are they but Dutch? Is there anything in English art like them? The conclusion to which one must arrive is that the marquetry clock-case panel is Dutch or Anglo-Dutch. The derivative character runs through the whole gamut from the reticent and well-balanced panel period to the "all over" phase, when every inch was covered with marquetry, to the arabesque and intricate mosaic work reminiscent of Persia, and finally to the decadent period when Eastern carpets found themselves reproduced in marquetry on the clock-case. [Illustration: WILLIAM AND MARY CHEST OF DRAWERS. On original stand. Decorated in marquetry. Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers. (_By courtesy of Messrs. Hampton & Son._)] [Illustration: CHEST OF DRAWERS DECORATED IN MARQUETRY. Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers. (_By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons._)]