Chippendale’s approach of mixing and matching numerous options—think what he could have done with a modern spreadsheet—underlines an important aspect of eighteenth-century chair design. Chairmakers distinguished between applied ornamental themes, which were a function of the client’s taste—and his or her pocketbook—and the basic configuration of a chair, which was fixed by tradition and experience. This ensured that whatever its appearance, a chair could be counted on to provide sturdiness, stability, and comfort.
As promised, Chippendale presented three different styles: Modern, Gothic, and Chinese. The last two, probably influenced by Darly, were pure fantasy: “Gothic” had no more to do with the Middle Ages than “Chinese” had to do with the Orient. In the case of the Chinese side chairs, the geometrical motifs were not based on actual yokeback chairs but on the decorative fretwork found in folding screens and scroll paintings. Chippendale also included three “ribband-back” chairs, which had intricate splats carved in the shape of intertwined ribbons. He rhapsodized that these chairs were “the best I have ever seen (or perhaps have ever been made).”
Ribband-back chair (after Thomas Chippendale)
The best-remembered pattern-book authors today, other than Chippendale, are George Hepplewhite and Thomas Sheraton. Their popular furniture guides went through several editions, although they lack Chippendale’s authority, because no actual pieces of Hepplewhite furniture have ever been identified, and Sheraton was strictly a designer, not a cabinetmaker. So was Thomas Hope, a gifted dilettante and the author of Household Furniture and Interior Decoration. Nevertheless, like the Director, these handbooks were responsible for the spread of what was, in effect, a canon of furniture design. Thanks to these publications, provincial cabinetmakers who had no opportunity to visit a London upholsterer’s showroom, let alone to see a country house interior designed by Adam or Chippendale, had at their disposal sufficient information to produce furniture of a high standard.
The Sweetness of Living
Thomas Sheraton once remarked of London cabinetmakers, “when our tradesmen are desirous to draw the best customers to their ware-rooms, they hasten over to Paris, or otherwise pretend to go there.” In November 1769, Thomas Chippendale went to Paris on a shopping trip. He returned on the Calais packet, and when it docked in Dover he paid import duty on his purchases—sixty unfinished chair frames. In those days, if a customs officer suspected fraud, he had the right to confiscate the goods, pay the importer the declared value, and sell the goods at their actual price, pocketing the difference. That is what happened to Chippendale, who had declared the total value of his chair frames as eighteen pounds, even though they were worth at least three times as much. In his defense, it should be said that at the time he was in severe financial straits. His business partner, Rannie, had recently died, and to settle his estate—and his debts—Chippendale had been obliged to auction off his shop’s entire stock. Moreover, several of his clients were tardy in paying their bills, leaving him hundreds of pounds out of pocket.
Chippendale planned to complete the unfinished chairs in his own workshop. It is unclear whether he bought the frames because they were cheaper or (more likely) because he wanted to get his hands on chairs in the latest neoclassical style, which was all the rage in Paris. Like couturiers in the 1950s, Parisian furniture makers in the eighteenth century led the field. French furniture-making was highly regulated. Chippendale would have purchased his chair frames from a menuisier, or joiner, probably from a shop in the Bonne-Nouvelle district, where most joiners lived. The French distinguished between joiners, who worked in solid wood, and cabinetmakers, or ébénistes, such as Jean-François Oeben, who made Madame de Pompadour’s mechanical dressing table. Ébénistes were the aristocracy of the trade, specializing in casework (tables, desks, commodes, armoires) covered in ornamental marquetry of precious woods. Joiners provided cabinetmakers with the rough underframe for their work, and the two crafts belonged to the same guild. If a chair frame was decoratively carved, that work was done separately by a member of the carvers guild; similarly, gilt-bronze mounts required a bronzer’s participation, while turned pieces came from a turner. Painting and gilding were done by separate guilds; so was upholstery. The advantage of this division of labor was that each guild maintained high standards of workmanship and the result was exquisite furniture of exceptionally high quality.
With so many actors, who was actually responsible for design? Sometimes joiners hired upholsterers to complete a chair, sometimes upholsterers bought unfinished frames from joiners and sold the finished chair on their own account. Occasionally a customer would approach a master joiner with a specific idea, but mostly designs originated with a third party who acted as an intermediary between the customer and the craftsman. This go-between might be an architect, an artist, or an upholsterer. Upholsterers not only upholstered chairs but also supplied their customers with fabrics for wall coverings, drapes, and carpets, and thus they assumed a key role in the decoration of houses. Another middle man was the marchand mercier, or furniture dealer, who operated outside the guild system and was purely a merchandiser whose fashionable showroom carried a variety of home decorating goods. Although Diderot in his Encyclopédie defined the marchand mercier as “seller of everything, maker of nothing,” dealers such as Lazare Duvaux, who supplied the furnishings for Madame de Pompadour’s many residences, exercised a considerable influence on their clients’ tastes.
A new idea for a chair was first presented to a customer as a detailed, life-size drawing. After the general design was approved, if it was an important piece, a scale model of clay or wax was made, four to six inches high, and often incorporating alternative solutions for legs and armrests. After these details were finalized, a carver would build a larger wooden model, one-third actual size, showing the final chair complete with carved ornament and even upholstery, using fabric woven with miniature patterns. Based on this model and accompanying drawings, a joiner would make life-size working drawings of the various parts of the chair frame. These drawings were then transferred to wooden templates similar to a tailor’s paper patterns. The templates were used to trace the outline of a piece onto the raw wood, generally beech or walnut. The roughly finished chair frame, complete with mortice-and-tenon joints, was provisionally assembled, then sent to a carver. Once he had done his work, he returned the finished parts to the joiner, who pegged, glued, and screwed them together, and smoothed down the joints.
If the chair was to be stained or polished, that work was done by the joiner; otherwise the finished frame was sent to a painter or a gilder. Gilding was more expensive than painting, not only because of the material but also because the carving had to be deeper to account for the coats of gesso that were applied as a base for the gold leaf. The final step was upholstering. Upholstery on the seat and back could be stuffed panels that were “dropped in” to the chair frame (and could be changed seasonally), or the fabric could be fixed permanently to the frame with brass tacks. The price of upholstering could equal or even exceed that of joinery and carving, depending on the quality of the fabric, such as specially woven tapestry.
A cheaper alternative to upholstery was caning, which was done either by a basketmaker or by the joiner himself. Caning is another example of the influence of Chinese techniques on European chairmaking. Caned chairs were light and airy, easy to move. They appealed to the growing desire for informality. Moreover, unlike upholstery, caning did not trap mites and fleas, an advantage in an age not known for cleanliness.
A typical joiner’s workshop included the master and half a dozen journeymen, each with one or two apprentices. In the 1720s, the Parisian cabinetmakers and joiners’ guild included almost a thousand masters; the carvers’ and painters’ guilds, an equal number. The cabinetmakers and joiners’ guild required masters to sign their work, so the names of master chair joiners are known. Among the most celebrated were Nicolas-Quinibert Foliot, who made the armchair that Sotheby’s auctioned for $653,000; Nicolas Heurtau
t, the rare case of a master joiner who was also a master carver; Jean-Baptiste-Claude Sené, who regularly worked for the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne, which supplied the royal household with furnishings; Jean-Baptiste Tilliard, who, like many joiners, belonged to a family of chairmakers; and Georges Jacob, who produced the first chair à l’anglaise, that is, made entirely of varnished mahogany.
Fauteuil à la reine (Nicolas-Quinibert Foliot)
Eighteenth-century furniture was expensive. At a time when a journeyman joiner earned three livres a day, a good-quality armchair might cost as much as a hundred livres.5 For that hefty sum, the fortunate buyer got a chair that was not only roomy, comfortable, and beautifully made, but also visually seductive. There is a story that one of the spinster daughters of Louis XV was asked why she had not entered a convent like her youngest sister. “It was an armchair that was my undoing,” she replied.
In English, a chair is a chair, but in French a simple side chair is a chaise, while an upholstered chair with padded arms is a fauteuil. The latter represented the acme of French furniture-making. According to Peter Thornton, curator of furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, “With its curvaceous and accommodating shape, and well-rounded padding on its seat, back, and arms, [the fauteuil] was one of the most satisfactory forms of seat-furniture ever devised, pleasing both to the eye and the human frame.” The fauteuil à la reine (named in honor of the queen) was a heavy armchair that was traditionally an integral part of the design of a room, its location coordinated with the paneling, and its carving and upholstery integrated with the decor. The chair stood permanently against the wall, so the back was generally left undecorated. During the reign of Louis XV, as social customs became less formal, chair placement grew more casual. The famous painting Reading from Molière, by Jean-François de Troy, a contemporary of Watteau, captures such a relaxed moment. Half a dozen friends are lounging comfortably in large, low armchairs in the drawing room of a Parisian appartement. The heavy chairs are fauteuils à la reine—you can see the flat, unfinished backs—which have been moved to the center of the room and arranged in a loose circle. Three of the chairs match the silk damask on the walls, while two of them appear to have come from another room.
As informality took hold, furniture makers produced smaller and lighter fauteuils. There were several types. The fauteuil en cabriolet had a rounded back. The fauteuil à coiffer had a low back to facilitate the brushing of a lady’s long hair. The bergère, or shepherdess, was a tublike armchair with closed arms, low to the ground with more generous dimensions, and often with a fitted down cushion; in other words, a very comfortable armchair. The bergère gondole was a tub chair whose rounded back resembled the prow of a gondola, while the wide marquise had continuous arms and back. The bergère à oreilles—a chair with ears—was the French wing chair, and was sometimes called a bergère en confessional because the sitter was partially hidden, as in a confessional box.
Chaises longues have already been discussed, and seating furniture included a variety of canapés, or sofas, which were basically stretched fauteuils. There are examples of winged settees, and corbeille sofas whose backs wrapped around the sides like a basket. So-called Turkish sofas were deep enough to support the legs, and were fitted with bolsters and cushions. The canapé à confidents was an unusual sofa with separate end seats that were either fixed or detachable. This allowed two people—the confidents—to have an intimate conversation, literally tête-à-tête, while decorously appearing to sit apart.
There was an astonishing variety of side chairs. Dining chairs generally had upholstered seats; backs were either decoratively slatted, caned, or upholstered. Toward the end of the century, round-back dining chairs (en médaillon) became popular. The chauffeuse, or warming chair, was a low lady’s side chair, like a slipper chair, usually placed beside the fireplace in a bedroom. Because the study was a male preserve (Madame du Châtelet notwithstanding), desk chairs had a masculine character and were often upholstered in leather. Some had saddle-shaped seats supported by center legs, and some swiveled, the model for Jefferson’s “whirlgig chair.” Card games were a popular pastime, and spectators would often turn a chair and straddle it, leaning on the top rail. Furniture makers produced the voyeuse (looking chair), whose padded rail made this position more comfortable. Card players could use a ponteuse, in which the padded rail held a box for one’s bets (pontes). Ladies could hardly be expected to straddle, and they used a voyeuse à genoux (kneeling chair), which resembled a prie-dieu and had a seat low enough to kneel on and a taller back with a padded rail. Such chairs were also made for listening to music, and there are several examples with backs in the shape of lyres.
Louis XVI voyeuse à genoux
What was the reason for this extravagance of choice? In part, an appetite for novelty. Fashion reigned supreme, and the nature of fashion is that it changes: what is attractive and interesting in one decade becomes uninteresting and dull in the next. A chair such as the klismos had persisted for hundreds of years, but the French eighteenth century regularly produced new types of furniture such as the bergère and the voyeuse. Changing tastes also played a role. After thirty years, people tired of rococo and turned to a more severe neoclassicism. After only a decade, that was succeeded by the goût arabesque, which combined elements of both rococo and neoclassicism.
Although French chairmakers experimented with new forms of decoration, like their English counterparts they never abandoned their hard-won knowledge of joinery and ergonomics. The eighteenth century simply extended the earlier discoveries of comfortable seating by creating greater variety. There were chairs for all occasions, grand as well as casual; chairs for sitting alone as well as in groups; for sitting up, for lounging, and for reclining; different chairs for conversation, reading, playing, and napping. The variety of postures—straddling a voyeuse, or sinking into a bergère—reflected a less self-conscious attitude toward the human body and an awareness of the richness that life offered. Talleyrand, who served the Revolution and Napoleon, but was born during the reign of Louis XVI, understood the charms of the ancien régime. “Those who haven’t lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution do not know the sweetness of living,” he once observed. La douceur de vivre.
SIX
Sack-backs and Rockers
In the late seventeenth century, people living in the American colonies who wanted fine furniture had to import it from England. But by the early 1700s, they had their own cabinetmakers. The leading center of furniture-making was Boston, followed—and in the latter half of the eighteenth century surpassed—by Philadelphia. Smaller cities such as Newport, Rhode Island, also developed local expertise. Furniture was exported to other coastal colonies: Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. As early as 1730, decades before the appearance of Chippendale’s pattern book, Boston cabinetmakers were producing side chairs with cabriole legs (called bandy legs) and ball-and-claw feet (called crowfeet) that rivaled English models for quality. New World cabinetry was facilitated by the availability of hardwoods—black walnut from Pennsylvania and Virginia, as well as Jamaican mahogany, which was used long before it became popular in England. After mid-century, English pattern books enabled American cabinetmakers to keep up with the latest fashions. Chippendale’s Director was popular, as was Robert Manwaring’s The Cabinet and Chair Maker’s Real Friend and Companion, which was published in Boston only two years after it appeared in London.
A ready supply of hardwoods is hardly sufficient to explain the accomplishments of colonial furniture makers. A new demand for high-quality furniture was part of a broad cultural change. The historian Richard L. Bushman has described the process of refinement that began in 1700 as the consequence not simply of greater prosperity and fashion consciousness, but of a genuine and widespread desire for gentility. This desire manifested itself in many different ways, not least the impulse to beautify one’s surroundings, especially one’s home. “Men of substance everywhere occupied themselves with the details
of architecture, furniture design, and landscaping,” writes Bushman.
The leading “man of substance”—in many ways a national model—was George Washington. In 1757, he began to enlarge his house at Mount Vernon and to beautify its grounds, and over the next three decades he made it into a twenty-room mansion that was one of the larger houses in Virginia. He furnished the rooms with a variety of chairs from many sources. One of his earliest acquisitions was six used black walnut Chippendale-style side chairs, which he bought from a fellow officer while he was serving in the Virginia militia. Later, he ordered a dozen mahogany side chairs from his English agent in London; the wing chair in his and Martha’s bedroom came from an English auction house. In 1790, Washington bought several fauteuils and a bergère with a footstool from the Comte de Moustier, the departing French ambassador.
Now I Sit Me Down Page 7
