Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Upholsterer   Listen
noun
Upholsterer  n.  One who provides hangings, coverings, cushions, curtains, and the like; one who upholsters.
Upholsterer bee. (Zool.) See Poppy bee, under Poppy.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Upholsterer" Quotes from Famous Books



... a white terrace boasting Grecian pillars and a railed-in stretch of grass in front of the windows. The rooms were large and handsome, and of that severe, box-like outline which are the despair of the modern upholsterer. The drawing-room boasted half a dozen windows, four in front, and two at the side, and as regards furnishings was a curious graft of modern art upon an Early Victoria stock. Logically the combination was an ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... his head, the stars sparkled—to use the fiddler's picturesque expression—like "gilt nails driven into the ceiling of the firmament by an audacious upholsterer." No sound could be heard, save the crackling of the snow beneath Richard's feet, as he put them down with the heaviness of old age. The road he had to follow was very narrow; its complicated windings passed through a dense forest which the axe had not ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... square, and twelve high, with sash windows, a door, and two closets, like a London bedchamber. The board that made the ceiling was to be lifted up and down by two hinges, to put in a bed, ready furnished by her majesty's upholsterer, which Glumdalclitch took out every day to air, made it with her own hands, and letting it down at night, locked up the roof over me. A workman, who was famous for little curiosities, undertook to make me two chairs, with backs and frames, of a substance ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... Tyburnia was completed by this time, as gorgeous as money could make it. How different it was from the old Fitzroy Square mansion with its ramshackle furniture, and spoils of brokers' shops, and Tottenham Court Road odds and ends! An Oxford Street upholsterer had been let loose in the yet virgin chambers; and that inventive genius had decorated them with all the wonders his fancy could devise. Roses and cupids quivered on the ceilings, up to which golden arabesques ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... standing over her in her own sitting-room up-stairs. It was a pretty room, looking away to the mountains, with just a glimpse of the lake to be caught from the window, and it had been prepared for her with all the skill and taste of an accomplished upholsterer. She had selected the room for herself soon after her engagement, and had thanked her future husband with her sweetest smile for giving her the choice. She had thanked him and told him that she always meant to be happy,—so happy in that ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... public. The Panorama was then partly in outline, and we had to catch its identities through a maze of scaffolding poles, planks, and stages; while the immense domed area re-echoed with the operations of scores of artistes of every grade, from the upholsterer nailing up gay draperies, to the heavy blow of the carpenter's mallet. We took advantage of our privileged visit, to point out to the reader how much he might expect from a visit to the Panorama, and, in our subsequent visits we have not for a moment regretted the particular attention we were induced ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various

... the colour of muddy water, glorified ginger-jars, ebonised chairs and tables, and willow-pattern plates all round the cornice; curtains mud-colour, with a mediaeval design in dirty yellow, or, in upholsterer's language, "old gold." ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... great effect in improving the public taste in such matters. This was followed by two magnificent works, On the Costume of the Ancients (1809), and Designs of Modern Costumes (1812). Up to this time his reputation had been somewhat that of a transcendent upholsterer, but in 1819 he astonished the literary world by his novel, Anastasius; or, Memoirs of a Modern Greek, a work full of imagination, descriptive power, and knowledge of the world. This book, which was ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... looking at things, and am disposed to judge men, not by what they do but by the skill they have in the use of words. And I know that when an artist comes into my house he "sizes me up" from the pictures on the wall, just as when the upholsterer comes he "places" me according to the style of the chairs and the quality of the carpet, or as when the gourmet comes he judges by the cooking and the wine. If you give him champagne he reverences you; if hock he puts ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... daughter of an upholsterer keeping shop under the arcades of the Market. Limited means compelled Monsieur and Madame Saillard at their start in life to bear constant privation. After thirty-three years of married life, and twenty-nine years of toil in a government office, the ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac

... ago, a London drawing-room was seldom beautiful; but size is always something, and, if Mrs. Redmain's had not harmony, it had gilding—a regular upholsterer's drawing-room it was, on which about as much taste had been expended as on the fattening of a prize-pig. Happily there is as little need as temptation to give any description of it, with its sheets of glass and steel, its lace curtains, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... common upholsterer of the Poor House, turned away his face, and wiped his eyes with the skirt of his coat. Close by him stood the man who shared his horrid duties, gazing with a look of stolid indifference on the scene. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... said Mrs. Thayer. "Just perfect. The man has done his work very well." She was referring to the upholsterer, and at the moment ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner

... shell. He found Lady Mabel busy renovating, modernising and adorning the rude and comfortless apartments of her monastic quarters. Immediately his pencil, his professional ingenuity and skill are devoted to her service. He appoints himself architect, upholsterer and improver-general to the household. He designed elegant curtains, with graceful festoons for the misshapen windows, tasteful hangings to conceal bare walls of rough-hewn stone, picturesque screens to hide unsightly corners; and arranged and put them up with as much skill as if, with a native ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... an interesting chat with Mr. Franklin Homan, Auctioneer, Cabinet-maker, and Upholsterer of High Street, Rochester. Our informant did a good deal of work for Charles Dickens at Gad's Hill Place, and remarked "he was one of the nicest customers I ever met in my life—so thoroughly precise and methodical. If anything had to be done, he knew ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... sat side by side on a sofa that sorely needed the ministrations of an upholsterer. Hen was sweet-faced, but habitually pale, usually a little worn. Her eyes and expression saved her from total eclipse in whatever company; otherwise she would have been annihilated now by the juxtaposition of her cousin. Cally's face was framed in an engaging little turn-down ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... windless, moon-washed, odorous with garden-scents; the moon, nearing its full, was a silver egg set on end—("Leda-hatched," he termed it; "one may look for the advent of Queen Heleine ere dawn"); and the sky he likened to blue velvet studded with the gilt nail-heads of a seraphic upholsterer. Francois was a poet, but a civic poet; then, as always, he pilfered his ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell

... mattress had cost less than one made of straw, as the latter requires an addition of two pounds of new straw every year. In comparison with horsehair, it is three times cheaper; it is safe from the attack of moth, and in a finished sofa no upholsterer would be able to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various

... and things made of cotton wool; of which the quantity is so great, that they told me there were near a thousand horse-packs of such goods from that side of the country, and these took up a side and half of the Duddery at least; also a part of a street of booths were taken up with upholsterer's ware, such as tickings, sackings, kidderminster stuffs, blankets, ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe

... refined and cultivated tastes, as the pictures, books, and various articles of vertu that have preceded her seem to indicate much critical and artistic acumen. The entire building has been refitted in exceedingly handsome style, and the upholsterer who was arranging the furniture told me it had been purchased ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... new way, leaning back behind her in the class and tracing out the twists between the questions; for Lucilla can only afford to use her own, and a few strands of harmless Berlin wool under it; she can't buy coils and braids and two-dollar rats, or intricacies ready made up at the—upholsterer's, I was going to say. So it is not a hopeless puzzle and an impracticable achievement to little Arctura Fish. It is wonderful how nice she has made herself look lately, and how many little ways she puts on, just ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... the infliction of female passengers, Tom Virtue did it handsomely, and when the party came on board at Ryde they were delighted with the aspect of the yacht below. She had been repainted, the saloon and ladies' cabin were decorated in delicate shades of gray, picked out with gold; and the upholsterer, into whose hands the owner of the Seabird had placed her, had done his work with taste and judgment, and the ladies' cabin resembled ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty

... horn,—'tis well,— He curls up in his sanctuary shell. He's his own landlord, his own tenant; stay Long as he will, he dreads no Quarter Day. Himself he boards and lodges; both invites And feasts himself; sleeps with himself o' nights. He spares the upholsterer trouble to procure Chattels; himself is his own furniture, And his sole riches. Whereso'er he roam,— Knock when you will,—he's sure ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... polishing of walnut work and oiling of dark pine in kitchen and laundry, and the fastening on of a few silver knobs and faucets here and there, up-stairs, remaining to be done; then it would be ready for the upholsterer. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathedrals, the far away cornices—impart by contrast a humble and bourgeois expression to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, and in which the air of grandeur depends largely on the help of the upholsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of renewed shame for our meaner architectural manners. If the Italians at bottom despise the rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited of the tradition of form, the idea proceeds ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... a white spot will be the result of failing to remove it. Fasten cleats to the front and back rails with screws. To these cleats fasten the slats as shown in the drawing. A cushion of Spanish leather, such as is shown in the photograph, can be bought at the furniture store or the upholsterer's. It can be made by the amateur quite easily, however. The two parts are fastened together with leather thongs and the filling is of hair or elastic felt. A cushion for the back ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor

... afterwards wrote. It is only necessary to mention his papers on the Distress of the News-Writers[5]; on the poetaster, Ned Softly[6]; on the pedant and "broker in learning," Tom Folio[7]; on the Political Upholsterer, who was more inquisitive to know what passed in Poland than in his own family[8]; and on the Adventures of a Shilling.[9] His, too, are the Vision of Justice[10]; the story of a dream;[11] and the amusing account of the visit to London of Sir Harry Quickset, who, with his old-world breeding, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... things, my Lady saying that she could get a good merchant for her daughter Jem., he answered, that he would rather see her with a pedlar's pack at her back, so she married a gentleman, than she should marry a citizen. This afternoon, going through London, and calling at Crowe's the upholsterer's in Saint Bartholomew's, I saw limbs of some of our new traytors set upon Aldersgate, which was a sad sight to see; and a bloody week this and the last have been, there being ten hanged, drawn, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys

... "If I should be dead before he comes down, what a strange thing it, would be." Towards the close of the month she had an attack so alarming that he was summoned; but before, he had time to arrive she had expired, on the 1st of August, in a fit of rage brought on by reading an upholsterer's bill. On the way Byron heard the intelligence, and wrote to Dr. Pigot: "I now feel the truth of Gray's observation, that we can only have one mother. Peace be with her!" On arriving at Newstead, all their storms forgotten, the son ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... an upholsterer one of these days,' he remarked, as he arranged and prepared Wych Hazel's easy chair. ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner

... and you say she is so; and yet here she is married to a notorious gambler, and associating with mountebanks and all sorts of malodorous people. Why, I've seen her riding down the street with the upholsterer, and Mrs. Congdon told me that she saw her stop her carriage in front of a cigar store and talk with a barber in a white jacket for at least ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... he managed to cast his gloom aside, and displayed delightful gaiety. During dinner he inquired if the upholsterer would soon call to arrange the two little rooms which Marie was to occupy with her husband over the workroom. The young woman, who since her marriage with Pierre had been decided had remained waiting with smiling ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... actively employed during the absence of Maurice. Her first step was to send for an upholsterer. Other arrangements followed which quickly converted the drawing-room into a comfortable bed-room. She herself proposed to take such rest as she found needful upon the sofa ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... "That's the maddening part of it. Every French bed is an idyll—a poem of repose. The upholsterer puts his soul into its creation. A born genius, he expresses himself in beds. The rest of the junk he turns out..." He broke off and glanced about the room. His eye lighted upon a couch, lozenge-shaped, hog-backed, featuring the Greek-Key pattern in brown upon a brick-red ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... is the style in which DAMAS best succeeds. There is one in particular, Le Lovelace Francais, where he personates an upholsterer of the Rue St. Antoine, who has just been cornuted by the young Duke of Richelieu. This part he performs with much truth, and avec rondeur, as the critics here express it, to signify plain-dealing. But DAMAS is no less ignoble in comedy ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... Observe his shape how clean! his locks how curled! My only son, I'd have him see the world: His French is pure; his voice too—you shall hear. Sir, he's your slave for twenty pound a year. Mere wax as yet, you fashion him with ease, Your barber, cook, upholsterer, what you please: A perfect genius at an opera song— To say too much might do my honour wrong. Take him with all his virtues, on my word; His whole ambition was to serve a lord: But, sir, to you, with what would I not part? Though faith, I fear 'twill ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... young gentleman, his nephew, who came to wait on him at his chambers, in such form and ceremony, seem not to have settled the order of their precedence to this hour;[130] and I should hope that the upholsterer and his companions, who used to sun themselves in the Green Park, and who broke their rest and fortunes to maintain the balance of power in Europe, stand as fair a chance for immortality as some modern politicians. Mr. Bickerstaff himself ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... thoroughly finished off, externally and internally, so far as floors and doors and windows and staircases go, but of course entirely unfurnished. One of these is selected and hired (at a cost that would make some people gasp) for the determined evening. An upholsterer is turned in to put up temporary mirrors, chandeliers and curtains, and lay down temporary carpets; a florist, following, covers bare mantelpieces with captivating layers of cut-roses, ferns and mosses, and empties a whole conservatoryful of plants and flowers into ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... insensible, that his post was that of danger; and, though he scorned all personal apprehension, he well knew what must ever be expected by a commander resolved never to yield. Before Lord Nelson quitted London, he called at Mr. Peddieson's, his upholsterer, in Brewer Street, where the coffin presented him by Captain Hallowell had been sent; and, with his usual gaiety and good-humour, desired him to get the attestation of it's identity engraved on the lid—"For," added his lordship, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison

... wood until it is smooth, then stain it a mahogany color. The mahogany stain can be obtained ready prepared. After the stain has dried, attach brass handles, which can be obtained for a small sum at an upholsterer's shop. A round embroidered doily in the bottom adds to the appearance of the tray. —Contributed by Katharine D. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... now sure of Margaret's success and had passed on to other business. In the dim stalls there appeared only the shabby relations and rather gorgeous friends of the other members of the company. There was the young painter who loved the leading girl of the chorus, there was the wholesale upholsterer who admired the contralto, and a little apart there was the middle-aged great lady who entertained a romantic and expensive passion for the tenor. The tenor was a young Italian, who was something between a third-rate poet and a spoilt child when he was in love and was as cynical as Macchiavelli ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... mentioned a curious incident that happened in Darlington: how Mrs. Percy, upholsterer, and known to several of us, was walking along the street one day when her husband was living, and she saw him walking a little way before her; then he left the causeway and turned in at a public-house. ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead

... published by them, the "Alarm," in English, and the "Arbeiter Zeitung," in German, they unceasingly advocated the interests of the working class. These men were Albert R. Parsons, a printer, editor of the "Alarm;" August Spies, an upholsterer by trade, and editor of the "Arbeiter Zeitung;" Adolph Fischer, a printer; Louis Lingg, a carpenter; Samuel Fielden, the son of a British factory owner; George Engel, a painter; Oscar Neebe, a well- to-do business man, and Michael ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... think Miss Bathgate would like to see us departing with them to-day, but I won't be beat. In Priorsford we are, in Priorsford we remain.... I'll write out some wires and you will explore for a post office. I shall explore for an upholsterer who can supply me with an arm-chair not hewn from ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... England, September 2, 1726. The only existing record of this fact is the inscription upon his monument in St. Paul's Cathedral, London. His parentage came through a somewhat obscure family, his father being sometimes mentioned as an upholsterer and sometimes as a merchant of moderate means. Of his mother we know only her name—Chomley—and that she died when her second child, and only son, was an infant. The father was a strict, sturdy, honest, severe Puritan, the marks of whose character ever ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... rose and brown, and round it a salmon-coloured wisp of a turban—over them there is the arch of the frogged foot of the lateen sail. All but Bow are in full sunlight, sweating at their oars, he is in the shadow the sail casts on our bow. We recline, to quote our upholsterer, in "cairless elegance" on the floor of the stern, on Turkey red cushions under the shadow of the awning, and I feel sorry we have spent so much ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... Angelica," though said he with some spirit, "Jack Butts isn't a baggage-waggon, nor a Jack-of-all-trades; you make him paint pictures for your women's albums, and look after your upholsterer, and your canary-bird, and your milliners, and turn rusty because ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ground-floor of the house of my neighbour there is an upholsterer's workshop. The day before yesterday the master went out to fetch some work, and this morning he had not yet returned. In an agony of apprehension his wife went everywhere in search of him. His body has just been found at the Morgue ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... even the age of Conventionalities was now old; and Man's Existence had for long generations rested on mere formulas which were grown hollow by course of time; and it seemed as if no Reality any longer existed but only Phantasms of realities, and God's Universe were the work of the Tailor and Upholsterer mainly, and men were buckram masks that went about becking and grimacing there,—on a sudden, the Earth yawns asunder, and amid Tartarean smoke, and glare of fierce brightness, rises SANSCULOTTISM, many-headed, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... which she had seen, all dressed in feathers; and was tempted to strum furtive melancholy chords on my mother's zither.... Dear Franziska, whose comfortable blond good looks inspired the enamoured upholsterer in letters beginning "My dearest little goldfish"—Franziska, what has become of thee? And the Frau Professor, who averred with rhythmic iteration that teaching such a child was far, far worse than breaking stones on a high-road; ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... the theatre. The gold had a tendency to separate itself from the alloy, and Pepys only found poetry and romance endurable when they were pretty thickly veiled behind the commonplaces of rhetoric or broad fun or the realistic ingenuity of the stage carpenter and upholsterer. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... Twelvemonth ago, [2] I often mixed with the Rabble, and followed them a whole Day together, being wonderfully struck with the Sight of every thing that is new or uncommon. I have, since their Departure, employed a Friend to make many Inquiries of their Landlord the Upholsterer, relating to their Manners and Conversation, as also concerning the Remarks which they made in this Country: For, next to the forming a right Notion of such Strangers, I should be desirous of learning what Ideas ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... (and which has been honoured with some beautiful lines). I observed, however, that the parlour, from my perverted taste, looked rather awkward in being only whitewashed, and the same effected in rather the "olden time;" to remedy which fanciful inconvenience, on my return to Bristol, I sent an upholsterer[8] down to this retired and happy abode with a few pieces of sprightly paper, to tarnish ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... Thespis, a trteau or shed of vagrants, and that he presented us, at a price of toil and of anxiety that cannot be measured, with a Roman colosseum,—that is to say nothing. It is to undertake the measurement of the tropics with the pocket-tape of an upholsterer. Columbus, when he introduced the Old World to the New, after all that can be said in his praise, did in fact only introduce the majority to the minority; but Lord Rosse has introduced the minority to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... "but it is right that the nest be worthy of the bird; but why the devil do you compliment me upon curtains which are not paid for?—You make me remember, just at the time I am digesting lunch, that I still owe two thousand francs to a Turk of an upholsterer." ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... could possibly be given by a man in his position, Lydgate had offered the one good security in his power to the less peremptory creditor, who was a silversmith and jeweller, and who consented to take on himself the upholsterer's credit also, accepting interest for a given term. The security necessary was a bill of sale on the furniture of his house, which might make a creditor easy for a reasonable time about a debt amounting to ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... this mood he goes to see you, hoping for something like home, and you first receive him in a parlor opened only on state occasions, and that has been circumstantially and exactly furnished, as the upholsterer assures you, as every other parlor of the kind in the city is furnished. You treat him to a dinner got up for the occasion, with hired waiters,—a dinner which it has taken Mrs. Smilax a week to prepare for, and will take ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... pictures, too, in all Mr. Browning's interiors, seem to have grown out of the life of the persons. He has not merely come in and hung them up, as poor artist or upholsterer, to make a sumptuous house for fine people to move into. The character in any one of his poems seems to have devised the furnishing: it is distinct, exterior, not always helping or expressing the character's thought, sometimes to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... which caused death." Such was the charge upon which Leopold Renard, upholsterer, was summoned ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... shop; but now at last objects are to be shown in it which the great mass of the public expects to see only in shops and expects to be produced merely to sell. We remember how Lord Grimthorpe called Morris a poetic upholsterer. He meant there was something incongruous in the combination of an upholsterer and a poet; he would have seen nothing incongruous in the combination of a poet and a painter, because he would have called a ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... picturesque and the striking. He studies sentiments and sensations from an artistic point of view. He is a physiognomist, a physiologist, a bit of an anatomist, a bit of a mesmerist, a bit of a geologist, a Flemish painter, an upholsterer, a micrological, misanthropical, sceptical philosopher; but he is no moralist, and certainly ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,—as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to speak much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity;—a failure to live at all, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... this world; and it appears, that in consequence of Jonathan's cadaverous appearance, he very soon appeared in the Gazette; but what ruined Jonathan in one profession procured him immediate employment in another. An appraiser, upholsterer, and undertaker, who was called in to value the fixtures, fixed his eye upon Jonathan, and knowing the value of his peculiarly lugubrious appearance, and having a half-brother of equal height, offered him immediate employment as a mute. Jonathan ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat

... all day, and Dr. Brayle was in almost constant attendance upon her. A vague sense of discomfort pervaded the whole atmosphere of the yacht,—she was a floating palace filled with every imaginable luxury, yet now she seemed a mere tawdry upholsterer's triumph compared with the exquisite grace and taste of the 'Dream'—and I was eager to be away from her. I busied myself during the day in packing my things ready for departure with the eagerness of a child leaving school for the holidays, and I was delighted when we arrived ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... Wallenstein—as if they were the objects which could possibly arrest our attention and excite our sympathies in such a spectacle—is a falsehood of the realistic school. If a man means to paint upholstery, by all means let him paint it so as to delight and deceive an upholsterer; but if he means to paint a human tragedy, the upholsterer must be subordinate, and velvet must not draw our eyes ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... he never knew of but one instance in which a respectable person had gained his cause, and in which, he was ashamed to say, that he was a party implicated. The means resorted to were as follows:—A Jew upholsterer sent in a bill to a relation of his for a chest of drawers, which had never been purchased or received. Refusing to pay, he was summoned to the Court of Rights. Not knowing how to act, he applied to my informant, who, being under some obligations ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... St. Omer. At first an actor, he afterwards studied law and was called to the English bar in 1762. He made a translation of Tacitus, and wrote several farces and comedies, among which may be mentioned The Apprentice; The Spouter; The Upholsterer; The Way to Keep Him; and All in the Wrong. He also wrote three tragedies, namely, The Orphan of China; The Grecian Daughter; and Arminius. For the last-named, which was produced in 1798, and which had a strongly political cast, he received ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... was far from being as grateful, at first, as I ought to have been. I could only remember how happy such luck would have made us both if it had only come a year or so earlier. And the very day I got the place I passed the upholsterer's where the parlor furniture was,—green sofa and all. And I went home with the firm intention of blowing my brains out. The only thing that saved me that day was the fact that my landlady met me at the door with a miserable story about her troubles and her taxes, ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... house is!" observed Elsie a moment or two later, between her hammer strokes. "People who can get a carpenter or upholsterer to help them at any minute really lose a great deal of pleasure. I always adored baby-houses when I was little, and this is the same thing ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge

... glass, the painting and decoration put into the hands of a Bond-street finisher, who covered the walls with acres of gilding, and hung chandeliers from the ceilings, and placed mirrors upon the walls, till the rooms looked like the show galleries of an upholsterer, and very different from the fine solid habitable apartments they used to be in the time of the late proprietor. And a change nearly as remarkable took place on Mr Wilkins himself as in his house. He attended county meetings, and became learned in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... extraordinary manner), she applied to the old Duchess of Marlborough, who was as high spirited as herself, for the loan of the richly-ornamented hearse which had conveyed the great duke to his grave. "Tell her," said Sarah, "it carried the Duke of Marlborough, and shall never carry any one else." "My upholsterer," rejoined Catherine of Buckingham in a fury, "tells me I can have a finer for twenty pounds."-" This last stroke," says the editor of the Suffolk Correspondence, " was aimed at the parsimony of their Graces of Marlborough, which was supposed to have been ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... unnecessary. In the eye of aesthetic Japanese a room crowded with luxurious upholstery is a specimen of barbaric pomp, delighting the savage and unrefined eye of the hairy foreigners, but shocking to the purged vision and the refined taste of one born in great Niphon. No such tradesman as an upholsterer or furniture-dealer exists in Japan. The country is a paradise for young betrothed couples who would wed with light purses. One sees love in a cottage on a national scale here. That terrible lion of expense, the furnishing of a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... they are constantly writing to each other, waiting at their parties, and so on. 'Boots' is a subordinate functionary. The furniture of the room is generally taken from the former occupant at a valuation by the college upholsterer. Crockery he has always to find for himself; but in this matter, again, he has the college authorities to assist him ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various

... A week or two before the Camford term commenced, he engaged some splendid lodgings, the most expensive which he heard of, and, turning out the furniture which was usually let with them, gave an almost unlimited order to a fashionable upholsterer to see them fitted out with due luxury and taste. When he came up as a freshman, which he deferred doing until the last possible moment, he was himself amazed to see how literally his orders had been obeyed. The rooms were refulgent with splendour: ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... muslin curtains, with green lambrequins and borders, and your room already looks furnished. If you have in the house any broken-down arm-chair, reposing in the oblivion of the garret, draw it out—drive a nail here and there to hold it firm—stuff and pad, and stitch the padding through with a long upholsterer's needle, and cover it with the chintz like your other furniture. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... no need to enlarge on their valour. But it is pleasant to put on record the description of an officer's servant which has reached Mr. Punch from France: "Valet, cook, porter, boots, chamber-maid, ostler, carpenter, upholsterer, mechanic, inventor, needlewoman, coalheaver, diplomat, barber, linguist (home-made), clerk, universal provider, complete pantechnicon and infallible bodyguard, he is also a soldier, if a very old soldier, and a man of the most ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... a simple board, with an oblong rim on one side so padded with hair that the crown of the head entirely escapes pressure, may prove a very good substitute. The upholsterer should so fill the pad that the wearer will have difficulty in balancing it. It may be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... on the evening of the 23rd. Their house is very large, having been lately added to, and the town being very busy, preparing for an Agricultural Meeting, the upholsterer had not time to put down the carpets or put up the curtains, and the night being cold, we felt a little twinge of what a Canadian winter is; but the drawing-rooms were exceedingly pretty,—the walls being very light stucco, with ornaments in relief, and they were ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter

... listening. But he might have answered 'weary, weary! very lonely, very sad!' And there, with an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange, Paul sat as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... to believe that the illusion of the scene is very little helped by the most elaborate and realistic works of scene-painter, carpenter, and upholsterer. I have seen the house drowned in tears over that lugubrious and hollow 'East Lynne' when the stage has been enclosed in green baize and there has not been a stick of respectable furniture on the boards. ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray

... of the toolmakers, described the hand tool in a most realistic and objective manner as an "extension of a man's hand." The antiquarian, attuned to more subjective and romantic appraisals, will find this hardly sufficient. Look at the upholsterer's hammer (accession 61.35) seen in figure 45: there is no question that it is a response to a demanding task that required an efficient and not too forceful extension of the workman's hand. But there ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh

... such things. She was only stringent for buhl, and the last Parisian models, so we delivered our house into the hands of certain eminent upholsterers to be furnished, as we send Frederic to the tailor's to be clothed. To be sure, I asked what proof we had that the upholsterer was possessed of taste. But Mrs. P. silenced me, by saying that it was his business to have taste, and that a man who sold furniture, naturally knew what was handsome and ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis

... a reporter on the Times; of whom Sheridan said, hearing him speak, that his situation ought to have been in the body of the House of Commons, instead of the gallery. Brownly possessed very rare natural talents, was originally an upholsterer in Catherine- street, Strand, and by dint of application acquired a very correct knowledge of the tine arts: he was particularly skilled in architecture and heraldry. In addition to his extraordinary powers as an orator, he ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... place, for instance"—and he glanced at the note Alwyn had thrown on the table,—"you will share the honors of the evening with the famous man-milliner of Bond Street, an 'artist' in gowns, the female upholsterer and house decorator, likewise an 'artist,'—the ladies who 'compose' sonnets in Regent Street, also 'artists,—' and chiefest among the motley crowd, perhaps, the so-called new 'Apostle' of aestheticism, a ponderous ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... the masculine gender according to a decree of Nature, and, therefore, irresponsible for the slow pace at which his wits move—may not be able at once to analyze the odd heartache he feels in surveying the apartments fitted up by the upholsterer—or to tell you why they become no longer a tri-syllabled word, but "our rooms," within a day after wife and daughters have taken possession of them. The honest fellow cannot see but that the furniture is the same, and each article standing ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... with the heralds and ladies, the trumpets and the cloth of gold, would give truth and life to the representation.' It is difficult to see what abstract truth interpenetrates the cheer of the refectory, or what just calculations with respect to the future even an upholsterer could draw from a cloth, either of state or of gold; whilst most people will admit that, when the brilliant essayist a few years later set himself to compose his own magnificent history, so far as he interpenetrated it with the abstract truths of Whiggism, and calculated that ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... was an upholsterer of Queenhithe, whose business, however, was chiefly in the way of funerals. He kept a diary, which is much used by Strype in his Annals, but has been reprinted in full by the Camden Society. It is very ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham

... the elderly are first considered, seats are placed around the room, somewhat high, for the chaperons, and at their feet sit the debutantes. These red-covered sofas, in two tiers, as it were, are brought in by the upholsterer (as we hire chairs for the crowded musicales or readings so common in large cities), and are very convenient. It is strange that all large halls are not furnished with them, as they make every one comfortable at very little expense, and add to the appearance ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... raised, at a short distance from the centre of the principal front—and that the interior is to be splendidly adorned with marble, scagliola, and other rich materials; whilst the galleries, armoury, chapel, state-rooms, &c. are to display the most gorgeous ornaments of the cabinet-maker, upholsterer, decorative painter, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various

... she held strongly about the decoration of houses was, that the contents ought to represent the associations of the inmates, rather than the skill of their upholsterer; and for this reason she would not have liked to limit any of her rooms to one special period, such as Queen Anne's, unless she had possessed an old house, built at some date to which a special kind of furniture belonged. ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden

... know that she was occupied; it was better that her sister should be spared many of the duties which she was obliged to perform. Whilst arranging with the coffin-maker and the "Hegelein," the sexton and upholsterer, ordering a large number of candles and everything else requisite at the funeral of the mistress of an aristocratic household, she also found time to look after her father and Countess Cordula, who was better. Yet she did not forget ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... fault than a too startling magnificence. Mrs. Norton signed an agreement—100,000 francs a year, with the option of buying house and furniture for 2,000,000 during the first year of possession. A famous upholsterer undertook to correct and subdue the exaggerated splendor of a loud and gorgeous luxury. That done, Mrs. Scott's friend had the good fortune to lay her hand on two of those eminent artists without whom the routine of a great house can neither be established nor carried on. The first, ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy

... same time. A wife had come to give life to the picture; two children had been born. Nothing was wanting to this household, only the being true.... One day he was in his imaginary salon at Chaville, occupied in watching an upholsterer who was changing the arrangement of the tapestry. He was so absorbed in the matter that he did not notice a man coming toward him, and at the question, 'M......, if you please—?' he answered, without thinking, 'He ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... changed to resentment. "Of course he's not equal to Mr. Feuerstein," she said. "But he's a very nice fellow—at least for an ordinary girl." Sophie's father was an upholsterer, and not a good one. He owned no tenements—was barely able to pay the rent for a small corner of one. Thus her sole dower was her pretty face and her cunning. She had an industrious, scheming, not overscrupulous brain and—her hopes and plans. Nor had she time ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips

... within a week, we took up our abode at a cheerful lodging near Oxford Street over an upholsterer's shop. London was a great wonder to us, and we were out for hours and hours at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared to be less capable of exhaustion than we were. We made the round of the principal theatres, too, with great ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... Other friends and opera-comrades sent jewels and silver-ware, so that the Colleville household was far richer in superfluities than in capital. Flavie, brought up in opulence, began her married life in a charming apartment, furnished by her mother's upholsterer, where the young wife, who was full of taste for art and for artists, and possessed a certain ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... there were orders relating to the care he wished to be given to the final settling of his home,—which cost him not less than four hundred thousand francs. Mme. de Balzac must needs oversee the various contractors, Grohe, the upholsterer, Paillard, who had the contract for furnishing the parlour, Feuchere, the worker in bronze, from whom Balzac wished his mother to order two brackets in gilded copper, while at the same time she was to send him a complete list of all his table silver. He went into the most ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet

... The Upholsterer, in the Simple Accent of an Honest Man—Exactly as I am telling your Honor. He followed my advice; and I sent him red hot the furniture and fixtures which had been used by the River Fishery Company, whose president had just been sent to prison ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau

... fault with everything I admired. Nothing was quite the thing for Daisy until at last a manufacturer offered to get one up which should suit, and so the carpet question was happily ended for the time being. Then came the furniture, and unlimited orders were given to the upholsterer to do his best, and matters were progressing finely when order number two came from the little lady, who was sorry to seem so fickle, but mamma, whose taste was perfect, had decided against all blue, and would Guy please furnish ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes

... will need a rocking-chair and a sofa. I will ask Mr. Colman to step into some upholsterer's as he goes down town to-morrow, and send them up. If it wouldn't be too much trouble, Miss Manning, I will ask you to help Carrie and Jennie on with their hats and cloaks. They quite enjoy the thought of a run out of doors with you and your little girl. ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr

... small gravelled court or open place, perhaps thirty feet square. Opposite to the door of the red house was the door of that in which lived Fanny Heisse with her father and mother. They indeed had another opening into one of the streets of the town, which was necessary, as Jacob Heisse was an upholsterer, and required an exit from his premises for chairs and tables. But to the red house with the three gables there was no other approach than by the narrow passage which ran between the river and the back of Heisse's workshop. Thus the little courtyard was very private, and ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope

... into the country a while. She'd show you little cups and saucers, made of acorns, that would beat all they have in the Broadway toy-shops, (and cost you nothing, either); and soft, green seats of moss, embroidered with little golden flowers, much handsomer than any the upholsterer could put in your mamma's drawing room, (and which never fade in the sunlight); then she'd show you a pretty picture of bright green fields, where a silver stream goes dancing through, where little fish dart beneath, where the heated cattle come to drink, and ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern

... curl'd! My only son;—I'd have him see the world: His French is pure: his voice, too, you shall hear. Sir, he's your slave, for twenty pound a-year. Mere wax as yet, you fashion him with ease, Your barber, cook, upholsterer, what you please: 10 A perfect genius at an opera song— To say too much, might do my honour wrong. Take him with all his virtues, on my word; His whole ambition was to serve a lord; But, sir, to you, with what would I not part? Though, faith! I fear, 'twill break his mother's heart. ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... against the back of Lesbia's chair and talked to her. The two seemed very familiar, laughingly discussing the play and the actors. Smithson knew, or pretended to know, all about the latter. He told Lesbia who made Croizette's gowns—the upholsterer who furnished that lovely house of hers in the Bois—the sums paid for her horses, her pictures, her diamonds. It seemed to Lesbia, when she had heard all, that ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... fell, tempered by curtains, at the cheapness and simplicity of which a fashionable upholsterer would have sneered, but toward whose graceful folds, and soft, rich hues, the study-wearied eye turned ever gratefully. The two friends sat silently for some minutes in ruminative mood, till Grey, turning suddenly to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... talent, in the shape of a water-colored sketch of the Court and gardens. My lady's fairy-like embroideries of lace and muslin, rainbow-hued silks, and delicately-tinted wools littered the luxurious apartment; while the looking-glasses, cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners by an artistic upholsterer, multiplied my lady's image, and in that image reflected the most beautiful ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... majority, however, was small, and the duke thought it necessary to resign on March 20, whereupon the house of commons decided to proceed no further. A curious sequel of this case was an action against Wardle by an upholsterer, who had furnished a house for Mrs. Clarke by Wardle's orders, in consideration of her services in giving hostile evidence against her former protector. The plaintiff obtained L2,000 damages, and the law-suit was the means of producing a reaction ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... little bed of his own. At Norwich, I think, he made his first appearance in state. The moment he entered the house he appropriated to himself the chair of state, which had been provided by the local upholsterer for the express use of Queen Alexandra, then Princess of Wales, on her first visit to Norwich to confer honour and happiness on Queen Victoria's subjects in the ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... an upholsterer, of Pimlico, by his will, proved in 1869, left L10 each to the men in his employ who did not wear moustaches, and to those who persisted ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews

... Ah, my dear fellow, didn't I tell you? You wouldn't believe me; now you are convinced. The upholsterer whom the duke had agreed to settle with was shown out of the house when he presented himself, and the duke wrote next day to say that he would answer for nothing in regard to Mlle. Gautier. This man wanted his money; he was given part payment out of the few thousand francs ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils

... brought into use, while some loosened the pavement for the purpose of arming empty hands with missiles. The work of demolition soon commenced: the houses of Mr. Bourne, a grocer, and Mr. Leggett, an upholsterer, were plundered and set on fire. A simultaneous attack was next made upon the Nelson hotel; and by casting the lighted brands into other shops, which had been forcibly driven in, the mob were on the point of kindling a general conflagration. At this point, however, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... years. But, in 1765, the Free Society no longer availed itself of the premises of the Society of Arts. An independent exhibition was then opened at a large room, hired for the purpose, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, being part of the warehouse of Mr. Moreing, an upholsterer; and the exhibition of the following year was also held in the same place. In 1767 and 1768 the Society exhibited in two large rooms at the bottom of the Haymarket, Pall Mall. The Society published from time to time statements of its progress. In one of these the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... hay. Tossed up in generous piles, to make couches, or heaped against the trunks of trees to simulate arm chairs, they provide resting places that are not only luxurious, but uncommon. The costliest upholsterer can furnish no chairs or sofas more softly padded or more deliciously perfumed than these. With rugs or shawls thrown over them, to guard the garments of their occupants from any possible injury from moisture or from crushed insects, ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... constrained to accept of a bed at Mrs. Wadman's, for a night or two, till corporal Trim (who to the character of an excellent valet, groom, cook, sempster, surgeon, and engineer, super-added that of an excellent upholsterer too), with the help of a carpenter and a couple of taylors, constructed one in ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne



Words linked to "Upholsterer" :   craftsman, artificer



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com