Handbook Of Antique Chairs

CHAIRS

Chapter I

THE HISTORIC BACKGROUND OF CHAIRS

WON’T you have a chair?" This invitation has been a phrase of hospitality since the beginning of time, or the beginning of chairs. Since comfort, as someone has said, begins with sitting down, it might be well for the reader to sit down at once in order that this excursion into the history of chairs will begin, and continue, with comfort. If the history as written makes you squirm, try a more comfortable chair. If that does no good, most likely you are a connoisseur or a specialist, and just too, too sophisticated and opinionated for the practical, factual, and at times jocular approach of this book to chairs and chair history.

Social history begins with the chair is the way one pedant puts the chair in its historic place. To make such a statement is to invite disagreement. There is much to be said for hot water as the beginning of civilization. Some will insist that sanitary plumbing is the real harbinger of what we call civilization. Epicures aver there was no civilization before cooking became an art. And so it goes. For my part, I’m convinced that civilization began before history and that it started when man became conscious of his own consciousness. With that philosophical note we can dismiss the question of civilization’s beginning. If we seek real causes for concern we might, with more profit to ourselves, consider when our civilization will end. Meantime, here is a little slice of history concerning one of the chief assets of civilization: the chair, the sitting-down place, the object of class distinction, the throne of placement, of honor, and of royal prerogative—the rich man’s pleasure and the poor man’s delight—a comfortable frame in which to rest our own.

Stay in your chair, please. Long, long before we can get to the history of the thing you are sitting in or on—a chair—we shall have to go all the way around Robin Hood’s barn. The history of chairs is buried deep within the history of man. It is fascinating in its every facet, but the accumulated patina of centuries, on the broader progress record of man himself, hides it from casual view. We’ve got to dig on our own, and review the digging of many others. Let us be thankful we can sit in one of the things as we explore chair history and do our spadework without manual effort.

When the tombs of Egypt were first opened the legal looters were quite sorry to report that most of them had been robbed before. Some of them, apparently, had been looted within a few hundred years of their sealing. But luckily the earlier robbers were concerned only with jewels and precious metals. They left most of the objects of social history with which the Egyptians fitted the rooms they called tombs. Since they believed in immortality and in reincarnation in the flesh, these people of the Nile saw to it that favorite chairs, stools, tables, desks, and such were made a part of the last earthly home of the departed. Our modern looters found chairs in Egyptian tombs that look as modern as anything created by our present-day designers.

So finely made are these Egyptian chairs that it is quite obvious they are not firsts but rather masterpieces in the evolution of the thing we call a chair. Which is just another way of saying the chair, as we know it today, had evolved in Egypt by perhaps 3000 B.C. Probably the same thing is true of China. Unfortunately for anthropologists, the Chinese did not, as a habit, bury their dead with complete sets of household furniture. Therefore we cannot loot many ancient Chinese tombs for evidences of Chinese culture. But we have something else to be thankful for. The Chinese, since the beginning of their history, have had a great respect for antiquities. Their respect took the form of a religion and was not marked, primarily, by the accumulating instincts of collecting. The Chinese, in designating their ancestors as objects of worship, thereby automatically worshiped the possessions of their ancestors. Thus the Chinese were our first social historians. They were concerned with the present in relation to the past. The Egyptians were concerned with the present only in respect of its bearing upon one’s life after death. More than one keen student of these two civilizations has remarked that the Chinese prepared their newborn for life while the Egyptians prepared them for death. This mental attitude perhaps is the reason why there is still a China and half a billion Chinese, and why Egypt is precisely as it thought in its heart—as dead as the proverbial doornail.

Sumeria achieved a civilization, and was destroyed. On its foundations of thought, if not of actual, concrete things, other civilizations developed. The Cycladic civilization became the glory that was ancient Greece. The Greeks indubitably borrowed from the Egyptians. The Romans borrowed from both, and from the great Semite civilization that was Carthage. By some strange trick of fact—and of fate—we can compare the statuary of ancient Greece and Rome with the sculptured art of China of the same period. We are amazed at the puzzle posed, for example, by a pair of statues of Caesar Augustus and K’ung Fa Woo, the Elder or some other mandarin or nabob. By all that’s holy, they look alike.

It is really fun, tracing sources of art, design, and pattern. Of course all the tracing we do is based upon facts and artifact, on recorded history and surviving things. We know full well that we cannot always, if ever, place complete confidence in any early recorded history because it is most likely partial, biased, opinionated, and in some cases just a pack of lies. But things are different. They’re dumb in words yet eloquent as pictures. And one picture is worth ten thousand words.

Above: Chinese mandarin’s chair. Date from before 1500. Black lacquer with gold decoration. One of the type of chairs from which Chippendale copied his Chinese style, his Chinese brackets, and his square Marlborough leg and foot. Top right: Chinese mandarin’s chair of carved palisander, or violet ebony. The round seat and general style of chair suggest our corner chair. Lower right: Chinese scholar’s chair with mottled slate seat and back panel of naturally figured teak. This type of chair, dating from before c. 1500, is the chair that inspired the Flemish William and Mary and Queen Anne splat-back chairs.

Let’s take a long look at the history of chairs in Europe, at developments that were redevelopments, at redevelopments that were really inventions, and at the one chair invented in the colonies that became the United States—the rocking chair. We must use the word invention in its most elastic sense. Nothing is ever invented. Inventions are either long-term evolutions or short-term evolutions, commonly called revolutions. Inventors don’t do the inventing; they are merely the catalysts who make the result of evolution or revolution manifest in concrete form as the answer to a great public need and desire. This isn’t a fanciful statement to suit the occasion. It is a fact, quite simply stated. As we have noted before, and may note again, the steamboat was not invented because people wanted a steamboat. It just had to come true because millions of people wanted safer, surer water transportation without the hazards of wind and tide dictating speed and safety.

It may well be that the first prehistoric mother to swing her infant from a hickory limb noted that the swinging quieted the infant and thus first discovered the cradle principle. When, some thousands of years later, somebody put rockers on a box to achieve the same effect, the invention was so breathtaking that it stopped further thinking on the subject. Now we fondly believe that our own Benjamin Franklin, in a philosophical moment, realizing that all men and women look back with longing to the days of their childhood—to their cradle days—put cradle rockers on a chair and put them on the right way, to give backward and forward motion rather than sidewise motion. When and if Franklin did that, or whether it was somebody else, doesn’t matter. What does matter is that a rocking chair does lull one and gives comfort. No matter how much interior decorators look down their noses at rockers or how much etiquette experts talk against them, rocking chairs are here to stay.

Europe, falling heir to the grandeur that was Rome, managed to do two very significant things. It embraced Christianity and deleted almost every phase of Roman civilization because it was pagan. In later pointing the finger of scorn at Mohammedans for disliking all things of the infidel, even the geometry of Euclid, the Vicars of Christ on Earth failed to remember they had been doing the same thing for many centuries. Yet actually it was the Mohammedan—the Saracen—who motivated a return of Europe to the ways of civilization. The Mohammedans had control of the Holy City of Jerusalem. The Christian world was quite concerned as to what might happen to Jeru-Salem, the ancient city of the Jews. To them it was the place of the Holy Sepulcher. It just had to be wrested from the hands of the unbelievers.

At any rate the Crusades to rescue the Holy City began. The first one, led by Godefroy de Bouillon and other nobles in 1096, marked the beginning of the end of the so-called Dark Ages. Neither that crusade which won—and lost—the objective, nor any of those which followed it, in repeated efforts up to 1271, rescued the City of Jerusalem from the Saracens. But the Crusaders who came home brought with them ideas which, little by little, sparked a complete reversal of thinking, planning, and doing. Came the Renaissance. Came revival of the civilization that Christianity had throttled at its source.

When Rome, the controlling nation of all Europe, embraced Christianity, a great deal of the ritual and formalism of the worship of Jove, Venus, Eros, et al., entered the worship form of Christianity. The new religion became more than a new way of life. It reverted to the old game of rule, a means whereby the thinking and consequently the doing of the people could be controlled. You can’t control happy people. They are either self-controlled and self-regulating or they are no longer happy. The new church used the ancient formula which Rome, in its wisdom, and which Greece, too, had attempted to abolish: that of complete control over the individual. The Church didn’t have an earthly punishment for its whip; it had the threat of hell.

The leaders of the First Crusade were important men, blessed by Pope, cardinals, and bishops. They didn’t own a chair on a par with those owned by any merchant of the Appian Way in the Rome of A.D. 100. By the time of the Ninth Crusade almost every big shot in Europe had very good chairs, called faldestols, the ancestor in both name and fact of what we call a fauteuil today—an upholstered chair. Where did they get the idea? From those rascally Saracens, those pagan Mohammedans, those heretic Turks!

Perhaps you are bored by all this. Maybe you’d be happier to know that the modern bathroom with all of its appurtenances came out of the Crusades, the sanitary toilet, the running-water basin, and the bathtub. Maybe you’d enjoy knowing that modern beds and bedding were recovered as a heritage because of the Crusades. Maybe you’d be glad to know that Hero’s steam-engine idea was rediscovered, that architecture was re-established as an art, and that the common man began to get a break, if not in fact, at least in the thinking that one day was bound to become a fact. It’s all true. The Crusades didn’t recapture Jerusalem but they did spark the recapture of all that Europe had lost when the civilization of Rome was suppressed by the Church.

Most people, when they think of the Renaissance, think of Gothic architecture and Gothic designs. We might as well go off the deep end here and now by stating that the name Gothic is quite wrong. There is nothing Gothic about what we call Gothic; the Goths didn’t have a single thing to do with it as inventors, designers, innovators, or artists. The name Gothic, of course, will stick. The glue of some ten centuries of misnomer will make it stick. So we must call our first period chairs Gothic. There are not many of them left save in museums and cathedrals that escaped bombing in Europe and the private collections of connoisseurs. Gothic furniture was never for the common people or the middle classes. It was for the Church and the ruling classes. We may be sure that Charlemagne, the one ruler who could meld the peoples of Germany and France into one nation, had his quota of Gothic chairs. The palaces of popes and cardinals had them. So did the princes, dukes, and kings. John Q. Public still sat on stools or benches, or squatted on his haunches.

Gothic chairs of the fifteenth century. Top: Carved oak chair from Savoy, c. 1460. Bottom: Faldestol from the French or Swiss Jura. Gothic polls or carved heads on back posts face outward and on front posts face inward. Chair is of oak, with wrought-iron stretchers. Both originally used with cushions on seats. Sometimes a piece of fine fabric was draped over the backs of faldestols.

Then the common people began imitating the furniture of their so-called betters. What we call folk art, a crude imitation of classic, or prime things of all sorts, began. The people enjoyed homely replicas of chairs, tables, pictures, fabrics, plates, and spoons from the great halls of the lords. The pictures were caricatures. The chairs and tables, chests and cabinets, were of the crudest. But a start was made. Let us be thankful. That’s when our own Declaration of Independence was born, as the whisper of the murmur of the inkling of an idea!

Where do these Saracens get all their luxuries, their porcelain, pottery, cloths, spices? the Crusaders asked one another, and asked it of captured Saracens. In trade, was the reply. In trade with the Injes, with Cathay, and the land of Prester John. Imagine it, all this has been going on right under our noses, so to speak, said the Crusaders. Wait until we tell the folks back home about this! At first it couldn’t be thought true. Then it had to be thought ungodly. Finally, it was accepted as fact, and