George Hepplewhite

British furniture designer. He seems to have trained as a cabinet-maker with the Lancaster firm of Gillow, and then set up a workshop at St Giles, Cripplegate, in London; but not a single piece of extant furniture is attributable to him. His simple and elegant designs, characterized by the free use of inlaid ornament and the use of shield or heart shapes in chair backs, only became famous with the posthumous publication by his widow of his Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide (1788), containing nearly 300 designs.

George Hepplewhite (died June 21, 1786) was a cabinet and chair maker. He was one of the "big three" English furniture makers of the 18th century, along with Thomas Sheraton and Thomas Chippendale. There are no pieces of furniture made by Hepplewhite or his firm known to exist but he gave his name to a distinctive style of light, elegant furniture that was fashionable between about 1775 and 1800. In 1788 she published a book with about 300 of his designs, The Cabinet Maker and Upholsterers Guide.

The book influenced cabinet makers and furniture companies for several generations. The work of these generations influenced in turn copies of the original designs and variants of them through the 19th and 20th centuries.