The style of decoration in furniture and woodwork which we recognise as "Queen Anne," apart from the marqueterie just described, appears, so far as the writer's investigations have gone, to be due to the designs of some eminent architects of the time. Sir James Vanbrugh was building Blenheim Place for the Queen's victorious general, and also Castle Howard. Nicholas Hawksmoor had erected St. George's, Bloomsbury, and James Gibbs, a Scotch architect and antiquary, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and the Royal Library at Oxford: a ponderous style characterises the woodwork interior of these buildings. We give an illustration of three designs for chimney pieces and overmantels by James Gibbs, the centre one of which illustrates the curved or "swan-necked" pediment, which became a favourite ornament about this time, until supplanted by the heavier triangular pediment which came in with "the Georges." The contents of Hampton Court Palace afford evidence of the transition which took place in the design of woodwork and furniture from the time of William III. until that of George II. There is the Dutch chair with cabriole leg, the plain walnut card table also of Dutch design, which probably came over with the Stadtholder; then, there are the heavy draperies, and chairs almost completely covered by Spitalfields silk velvet, to be seen in the bedroom furniture of Queen Anne. Later on, as the heavy Georgian style predominated, there is the stiff ungainly gilt furniture, console tables with legs ornamented with the Greek key pattern badly applied, and finally, as the French school of design influenced our carvers, an improvement may be noticed in the tables and _torchères_, which, but for being a trifle clumsy, might pass for the work of French craftsmen of the same time. The state chairs, the bedstead, and some stools, which are said to have belonged to Queen Caroline, are further examples of the adoption of French fashion. Nearly all writers on the subject of furniture and woodwork are agreed in considering that the earlier part of the period discussed in this chapter--namely, the seventeenth century, gives us the best examples of English work. As we have seen in noticing some of the earlier Jacobean examples already illustrated and described, it was a period marked by increased refinement of design, through the abandonment of the more grotesque and often coarse work of Elizabethan carving, and by soundness of construction and thorough workmanship. [Illustration: THREE CHIMNEYPIECES. DESIGNED BY JAMES GIBBS, ARCHITECT, IN 1739.]