Now I Sit Me Down (9 page)

Upholstered side chair, seventeenth century

The upholstered side chair was strictly an urban chair, but it had a provincial cousin. The rustic side chair had an unpadded ladder back and a seat made out of plaited rush instead of upholstery. In England, it was sometimes called a “Dutch matted chair,” suggesting that it may have been the Dutch who first wove plaited rushes directly onto the chair frame to form a seat. Wherever they originated, rush-bottomed chairs became ubiquitous, for they were extremely easy to make and did not require any special skills—or special woods. The inexpensive seats, of woven bulrushes or cattail leaves, were easily replaced when they sagged or wore out. Uninfluenced by fashion, the model survived unchanged for centuries—and survives today.

The seventeenth-century French printmaker Abraham Bosse, whose etchings depict everyday upper-class and bourgeois interiors, populated his rooms with side chairs that are clearly status symbols as well as conveniences. Chairs appear lined up against the wall in salons, reception rooms, ballrooms, and bedchambers. They are used by ladies at dressing tables, and by musicians during evening concerts. A family says grace at the table; the youngest child sits on a folding stool, everyone else sits on a chair. A portrait painter and his subject both sit on side chairs. There were obviously no rules about how this new, versatile furniture should be used. In one Bosse etching, a romancing couple has brought a pair of chairs out onto a loggia on a fine spring day. In another, a doctor attending a woman in labor uses a chair as a stand for his medicine chest. Coats and capes are casually thrown over chairbacks. It is as if, having discovered the useful side chair, people could not get enough of it.

Apogee

We give chair parts anthropomorphic names—legs, arms, back—so it is perhaps inevitable that chairmakers should express this association in their designs. While the human leg, with its extended foot, would make a strange, Daliesque chair leg, an animal leg, with its compact paw or hoof, is more suitable. One of the oldest surviving chairs in existence, dating from the twenty-sixth century
B.C.
, belonged to the mother of the pharaoh Cheops, who built the great pyramid at Giza. The reconstructed armchair, now in the Cairo Museum, is made of gold-plated wood decorated with papyrus flowers. The four legs are animal-shaped and rest on delicate little cat's paws, felines being revered cult figures. The legs of the chairs I saw in the Met's Egyptian gallery had similar cat's paws. The Greeks made heavy thrones with naturalistic animal legs ending in paws, hooves, or claws; sometimes the legs appear to belong to lions, sometimes to bulls. The legs of folding stools were likewise given animal shapes with visible fetlocks and hooves or paws. The Romans continued this practice, especially in table legs, whose exaggerated paws seem to belong to mythical monsters.

The ancient Chinese similarly mimicked animal shapes in their furniture. There are surviving ritual bronze vessels supported on tiger feet, and couches and tables whose legs rest on horse hooves and dragon claws. The last are usually carved grasping a pearl, which neatly solves the practical problem of how sharp claws meet the floor. While the legs of these tables are usually straight, in some cases they have a double curve that mimics the shape of a quadruped's rear leg. George Kates called this fetlock-inspired shape a “cabriole leg” because it resembled the double-curved European furniture leg. The English word
cabriole
is derived from the French
cabriolet
, a corruption of
capriole,
a particular leap in ballet. Armchairs
en cabriolet
were light enough to be picked up and moved. Such chairs generally had double-curved legs, which is the chief sense of the term in English. Since the Chinese examples date from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and the cabriole leg does not appear in Europe until the early eighteenth century, the resemblance is actually the other way around. The cabriole is yet another case of the Chinese getting there first.

Chinese goods arrived in Europe during the sixteenth century. The most highly prized import was porcelain, whose delicacy astonished Europeans, but chairs and tables, beautifully crafted out of extremely hard tropical woods, were also popular. These pieces were often lacquered, a technique that was unknown in the West. European cabinetmakers copied this finish, which they mistakenly termed “japanning.”

The influence of China resulted in the fashion for chinoiseries, objects that were vaguely influenced by Oriental motifs. But the Chinese influence could also be profound. Cabinetmakers adopted the double-curved leg (which the British called a “hock leg” or a cabriole leg) and used it in chairs, daybeds, sofas, tables, desks, and cabinets. In some cases, the animal shape was pronounced, with the foot carved to resemble claws or talons grasping a ball, in direct imitation of the claw-and-pearl foot. A dragon's foot might even include scales. In other versions—more appealing to the modern eye—the pronounced upper knee shape and the foot-shaped swelling at the base of the leg are abstract forms. The other profound change in chair design, also copied from Chinese models, was the S-shaped splat. The splat, which replaced the traditional padded backrest, followed the natural shape of the spine and supported the lumbar region. Back splats became popular because they were comfortable, made the chair lighter, and provided the cabinetmaker an opportunity for showing off decorative carving.

These changes to the chair should not be seen in isolation. The curved splat and the graceful cabriole leg, with its sinuous convex curve above and concave curve below, appealed to the Baroque sensibility that favored what the painter William Hogarth termed the “Line of Beauty” in art, architecture, and decor. The proportions of chairs changed, the seats becoming more commodious and wider at the front. This not only provided more comfort and stability, it also created a greater visual balance. The cabriole legs, which broadened at the knee where they connected to the seat rail, no longer required stretchers, and thus stood free. Only the front legs were curved; the rear legs, rectangular and slightly splayed, were a secondary compositional element.

Vincent Scully once observed that an occupied cabriole chair disappears behind the sitter, but an unoccupied chair can seem almost alive:

The arms curve; the splat lifts and gestures behind them. The back, with a wonderfully controlled curve, comes down and, often with a profoundly articulated hip joint, transmits its energies into the seat, which in turn transmits them to the legs. They are cabriole legs, and therefore they bend, almost crouch, and they terminate in feet of one kind or another. Eventually many of them became ball-and-claw feet, clutching and full of power. The whole chair becomes a kind of animal.

The side chair emerged first in the form of the klismos but, ignored by the Romans, it disappeared and was soon forgotten. The Middle Ages laboriously rediscovered the side chair, a crude device, not much better than the simple Cycladic chair of four thousand years earlier. The invention of upholstery improved things, but it was the influence of the ancient Chinese yokeback chair that was decisive. The cabriole chair brought together several separate strands: a comfortable padded seat, delicately carved wood, a supportive splat, and expressive double-curved legs. The last, in particular, produced something not seen before in a side chair—personality.

Cabriole chair, eighteenth century

 

FIVE

A Golden Age

A wing chair is a curious sort of chair. It is too vertical to be called a lounge chair, yet with its fully upholstered arms, back, and sides it is the perfect place to take a nap. We associate wing chairs with private clubs and cozy firesides, but they were originally intended for the bedroom. In fact, the first wing chairs, which appeared in England in the 1670s, were called “sleeping chayres.” A pair survives in Ham House, a grand mansion on the outskirts of London: ornate chairs with open arms, padded elbow rests, carved gilded frames, crimson brocade upholstery with gold fringe, and tall upholstered wings. Both the wings and the back are adjustable by means of iron ratchets.

The Ham House chairs were specially made for a suite of rooms decorated to receive a state visit by Queen Catherine, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. Despite their richness, the chairs have an improvised look; the rectangular wings are awkwardly hinged to the back—like a pair of shutters. If these aren't the first wing chairs they are certainly very early versions. We might credit the mistress of Ham House, Elizabeth Murray, Duchess of Lauderdale, with the idea, for this exceptional woman was an inveterate domestic inventor whose kitchen included an enclosed countertop cooking stove and who installed the first private bathing room in England for her own use (baths were usually taken in tin tubs brought into the bedroom by servants).

The adjustable flaps and the reclining back of the Ham House chairs were cumbersome, but the idea of an armchair that protected the sitter from drafts proved popular. As the design was refined, the wings, arms, and back were smoothly integrated, and the entire body of the chair was padded and covered in fabric. The legs in early wing chairs were usually ornate. In the case of the Ham House chairs, the stretcher is a double scroll that includes cherubs holding bunches of grapes, and elaborately shaped legs rest on carved seahorses. Later wing chairs were simpler, and by the Georgian period, cabriole legs were common.

Details changed, but the chair retained its basic form. George Hepplewhite included a wing chair in his furniture handbook,
The Cabinet-maker and Upholsterers Guide
, which was published in 1788. He called it an easy chair, and also referred to it as a “saddle cheek,” which was the traditional English term for a wing chair, because of the resemblance of the side panel to the cheekpieces of a horse's bridle.
1
Hepplewhite paired his chair with an adjustable “Gouty Stool,” a footstool “which, by being so easily raised or lowered at either end, is particularly useful to the afflicted.” Gout was a common eighteenth-century ailment; so were pulmonary disorders that obliged the sufferer to sleep sitting upright, for which the wing chair was well suited. The eighty-three-year-old Voltaire spent his final days in a specially made easy chair. The upholstered armchair, which is on display in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, is on casters, and is fitted with an attached bookrest on one side and a leather-topped writing pad with a drawer on the other; both swing out of the way when not in use. On each side are pockets where the great man—busy until the end—could store papers and books.

Wing chair (after George Hepplewhite)

My wing chair doesn't have a bookrest, but it would be a nice feature since I regularly use it for reading. My chair is not an antique. It was manufactured by the Hickory Chair Company of North Carolina, a firm that pioneered furniture based on eighteenth-century American models. Reproducing old furniture is not uncommon, as we have seen with the klismos. Like many Colonial wing chairs, mine has plain legs connected by stretchers. Although the padding is a combination of foam and sprung upholstery, rather than horsehair and down, the construction of my chair closely resembles its eighteenth-century predecessors: a wooden frame, padded and covered with fabric. It is the proportions and dimensions that are key. Hickory Chair once bought an expensive antique wing chair frame made by John Townsend, a famous Newport, Rhode Island, cabinetmaker, simply in order to be able to accurately reproduce its dimensions. This might seem like overkill, but it isn't. One doesn't tinker with perfection, and there is something almost magical about the chairs of that period.

The eighteenth century has been called the golden age of furniture. What makes the chairs of this period so special is a combination of highly refined technique, excellent materials, and a concern for physical comfort. It was not a matter of invention; the technical advances in upholstery and joinery had already been made—the eighteenth century merely perfected them. Prosperity assured a ready market among the growing middle class as well as the aristocracy, and widely distributed pattern books refined the taste of educated buyers and patrons. Later, the corrosive effects of the Industrial Revolution began to make themselves felt, but throughout most of the eighteenth century traditional craftsmanship prevailed, guaranteeing a level of quality in woodwork that has never been equalled, before or since. As we shall see, global trade also played a role, making first-class materials available to cabinetmakers. And what cabinetmakers they were! Just as achievements in the arts depended on the emergence of a surprising number of exceptional composers (Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart), painters (Chardin, Reynolds, David), and writers (Pope, Voltaire, Goethe), so too in chair-making, the creative powers of outstanding individuals made themselves felt.