The great period of English cabinet-making is associated with the names of Sheraton and his contemporaries, Chippendale, Hepplewhite (q.v.) and Robert Adam. It was through them that the craft of furniture-making was raised to an art. Thomas Sheraton was born in Stockton-on-Tees, and from the first showed a natural artistic leaning and a taste for geometry and drawing. He was apprenticed as a cabinet-maker but never rose to own a business or a house.
On 8 February 1779, he married Margaret Mitchinson in St Mary the Virgin church, Norton-on-Tees. Sheraton was a keen Baptist and continued writing religious essays until 1805, the year before his death. Sheraton's sense of grievance, it seems, at society's attitude towards the writings of an ill-educated craftsman, gave him an enduring sense of inferiority in this area. He produced a well-known engraving of the South end of Stockton High Street in 1787, but his sense of the restricted outlets for his talents in his home town prompted him to set off for London in 1790 - by some accounts he actually walked all the way. He returned to Teesside in 1793, however, on the death of his father, and it was then that he produced the engraving of the North end of Stockton High Street, dated 1794.
In Soho, during the 1790s (living at 106 Wardour St.) Sheraton achieved the success as a furniture designer which had eluded him as a craftsman. In his first publication, The Cabinet Maker's and Upholsterer's Drawing Book (1793), Sheraton mentions Chippendale and Hepplewhite among others in friendly fashion, but considers them all to have failings as teachers of perspective. The third part of the book comprises mainly neo-classical furniture designs, accompanied by long and interesting technical commentaries. The designs are competent and elegant on the whole, as Sheraton was the apostle of a severer taste than Chippendale with his rococo leanings. He introduced the kidney-shaped desk and table and 'pouch' sewing tables. Furniture made from Sheraton's designs show square tapering legs and severe lines. Sheraton trusted almost entirely to marquetry for ornament. A typical feature of his cabinets was the swan-necked pediment above the cornice, which was a revival from Queen Ann's reign.
The book attracted 600 subscribers, including all the best London firms, but also a large number in the North East, a testimony to his reputation. However, despite the fact that his designs were regarded in his own day with 'superstitious admiration', he existed in poor circumstances and none of his publishing ventures was successful. In 1799, he moved back to Stockton where he was ordained a Baptist minister for Stockton and Marton. In 1802 Sheraton returned to London and the following year published his The Cabinet Dictionary. Sheraton's final work The Cabinet-Maker, Upholsterer and General Artist's Encyclopaedia was left unfinished at his death in 1806. The text of the Encyclopaedia is eccentric and the entries range from Baptism to Balls of Fire, but its indiscipline is probably due to Sheraton's being a self-taught man rather than a symptom of the mental instability some have seen in his later works. It is quite clear Sheraton was a man of ability and driving energy. Nevertheless after his death in Broad Street, Soho, Sheraton left his family in poverty (they returned to Stockton). He was buried at St James, Piccadilly.
The influence of Sheraton's designs on the furniture trade was immense. The celebrated firm of Gillows adapted his designs, as did many cabinet-makers in America, and his name is popularly used to describe English furniture style between 1790 and 1800. The central doctrine of all his work was that ornament should subserve utility, and that the lines of construction, if sound, must connote beauty and that a successful simplicity is harder and more worthy of attainment than the highest Louis XV elaboration.