Now I Sit Me Down (2 page)

The boudoir is full of
stuff
: a delicate red-and-black lacquered tea-table, a gilded console table, a pair of candle sconces, an ormolu wall clock, oriental knickknacks, porcelain cups and saucers. “In effect, the only tokens of history continually available to our senses are the desirable things made by men,” observed the Yale art historian George Kubler in his classic
The Shape of Time.
“Of course, to say that man-made things are desirable is redundant,” he continued, “because man's native inertia is overcome only by desire, and nothing gets made unless it is desirable.” It was Kubler's thesis that desirable things not only mark the shape of time—in his happy phrase—but whether they are an opera by Rameau, a play by Molière, or a painting by Boucher, they also provide us with a window on the past.

Boucher documented a time when visual delight was combined with practicality. The eighteenth century excelled in furniture, and while the two caned side chairs in the painting are plain by the luxurious standards of the time, they look comfortable and the caning makes them light enough to be easily moved—the furniture arrangement near the window looks like a last-minute improvisation: “Let's have our chocolate over here.”

The Humble Stool

Boucher's little boy, who is holding a pull toy in the shape of a little horse—another desirable thing—is sitting on a low stool. Actually, it is a
repose-pied
, an upholstered footstool, but it serves him perfectly well as a seat. Stools are the simplest form of sitting furniture. There are several in our home: a counter-height stool in the kitchen, a low stool in the bathroom, and a pair in the dressing room. The stool in my study has been piled high with books for months, but that doesn't matter—it's only a stool. Stools probably first saw the light of day as flat slabs of wood with three pegged legs; three because floors were uneven. Simple stools existed—and exist—in all rural cultures; they are easy to make and serve a variety of uses, from peeling potatoes to milking cows.

In seventeenth-century England, the first everyday chairs were called “backstools,” because they were stools into which a straight board had been inset to support the sitter's back. Backstools continued to be used throughout the eighteenth century in rural Europe and America, their lack of comfort made up for by the simplicity of their construction. Such primitive chairs were descendants of the fifteenth-century
sgabello
, a fancy backstool found in the palazzi of Italian noblemen, whose coat of arms often adorned the carved backpiece. A simplified version called a
stabelle
can still be found in homes and country inns in present-day Alpine regions of Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.

Sgabello
, fifteenth century

A particular version of the stool that has survived over the centuries is the folding camp stool. Today, such stools are used mainly by fishermen, campers, and weekend painters, but before their adoption as portable seats for recreation, they served a different purpose. Folding campaign stools appear in many Civil War photographs of military encampments. A century earlier, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered eighteen folding stools from a Philadelphia upholsterer for his headquarters; one of these stools is on display at the Smithsonian.

The folding camp stool in the L.L.Bean catalog is virtually identical to Washington's stool except that it is made of aluminum tubes and ballistic nylon instead of wood and leather. The ingenious design has persisted because it is hard to improve. Lightweight and easily portable, with intersecting legs that fold flat when not in use but are stable when unfolded, the X-frame ensures that the fabric seat remains taut no matter the weight of the sitter. The design inspired the form of the starkly elegant stool that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed for the German pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. The leather cushion is supported by straps stretched between polished stainless steel X-frames, although the crossed legs do not fold. In addition to four stools, the pavilion contained two chairs of similar design that were reserved for King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugénie of Spain when they formally opened the building.

The furniture arrangement in the Barcelona pavilion followed historical precedent: Napoleon Bonaparte's throne room at the Château de Fontainebleau has two rows of upholstered X-frame stools, or taborets, but only one chair—the emperor's throne. The striking contrast between Napoleon's throne and the lesser stools is a reminder that status and sitting furniture are never far apart. Throughout history, grander, taller, more impressive chairs have been a mark of distinction, and their use has been a privilege reserved for the select few.

Napoleon's furniture maker modeled the taboret on the Renaissance scissors chair, whose legs were a series of intersecting curved wooden frames that extended up to support armrests. Sometimes the chair was foldable, sometimes not; sometimes it had a flat backrest. Renaissance scissors chairs were beautifully carved, often with expensive inlays of ivory, metal, and boxwood, and were reserved for nobility. When Andrea Mantegna painted
The Court of Gonzaga
, in the 1470s, he showed the Gonzaga family and courtiers gathered on an outdoor terrace. Only the marquis and his wife are seated, everyone else is standing. Her chair is hidden by her voluminous dress, but his scissors chair, covered in embroidered velvet, is plainly visible, as is a puppy lying contentedly between its curved legs. More than four centuries later, when Jacob Ezekiel sculpted the American financier Anthony J. Drexel, he portrayed the international banker and patron of the arts as a latter-day Medici by placing him on a Renaissance scissors chair.
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“Everything made now is either a replica or a variant of something made a little time ago and so on back without break to the first morning of human time,” observed Kubler, who distinguished between
replicas
, which were simply copies of earlier devices, and
variants
, which were modifications. The scissors chair was a replica of the medieval faldstool. Meaning literally “folding chair,” this X-frame portable throne accompanied kings, bishops, and other dignitaries on their frequent travels. Faldstools are mentioned several times in the
Song of Roland
; one of ivory, another—belonging to Charlemagne—of solid gold. The oldest surviving faldstool, which belonged to the seventh-century Merovingian king Dagobert, is made of cast bronze. The faldstool was a replica of the ancient Roman
sella curulis
, a ceremonial folding stool used by consuls, senators, and high magistrates. The curule was elaborately decorated and carved and was sometimes provided with arms, but it must have been uncomfortable if used for long periods for it had no back, a feature said to be intended to discourage overlong deliberation.

Renaissance scissors chair

The curule was a variant of the folding stool used by Roman military commanders in the field—a badge of rank as well as a seat. The Romans copied this stool from the Greeks. Stools (
diphroi
), both folding and four-legged, were a common feature of Greek life and were used by all strata of society—even the gods in the Parthenon frieze sit on stools. A vase painting from the fifth century
B.C.
shows a woman with a parasol sitting on a folding stool, apparently taking part in a picnic. A mural in the Minoan Palace of Knossos on Crete, dating from the fifteenth century
B.C.
, portrays several young men seated on folding stools, drinking wine. When the archaeologist Arthur Evans discovered the mural, he christened it the Camp Stool Fresco.

Roman curule

No actual Greek or Minoan folding stools have survived, but fragments of ancient folding stools have been found in funerary barrows in Germany and Sweden, and an intact Bronze Age folding stool was unearthed in an archaeological dig in Guldhoj, Denmark. The X-frame is ash wood and a fragment of the seat is otter skin. Scholars have debated if this stool is a Scandinavian invention, or if, like the folding stools of the Greeks and Minoans, it was a cultural import—a replica. If it was the latter, it traveled a great distance, because, as far as we know, the folding stool appeared first in pharaonic Egypt.

I visit the Egyptian collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where I find two wall paintings that portray men on folding stools. One is from the tomb of a high official and shows him supervising workers on his estate. The other, also from the tomb of a government functionary, depicts a group of young army recruits sitting on folding stools waiting to have their hair shorn. Evidently, the Egyptians used folding stools as everyday outdoor seats—not so different from today's camp stools—and they do not appear to have been badges of rank; many wall paintings depict stools being used by workers and artisans. On the other hand, an actual folding stool that is displayed in another of the Met galleries was clearly a luxury item: the frame is elaborately carved in the form of long-billed birds and is made of wood inlaid with ebony and ivory. This stool dates from the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom (1550–1295
B.C.
).

Eighteenth-dynasty folding stool frame

One of the wall paintings that catches my eye shows a carpenter sitting on a stool, using a bow-drill, with an adze and square close to hand. He is building a chair. There are many examples of Egyptian chairs at the Met, with and without arms, often beautifully carved, usually with woven cane seats, sometimes with seat cushions, occasionally combined with footstools. Unlike stools, chairs appear to have been reserved for the exclusive use of important personages. During the early Middle Kingdom, an unusual type of chair emerged with a backrest only a few inches high, just enough to support the pelvis and sacrum, leaving the back free to find its own angle of repose.
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None of these chairs has survived, but judging from graphic evidence it appears that the backrest may have been padded. This kind of seat appears in scores of statues, reliefs, and wall paintings of pharaohs, royalty, and other dignitaries. Indeed, the Egyptian hieroglyph for “revered person” depicted a noble seated in a chair. The chair man.