The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, vol. 06, No. 05, May 1900 / Chippendale Chairs

It is only within recent times that movable chairs have become common and indispensable. Seats of some kind must have been used from the time when houses were first built, but it is not until the civilization of the last two or three centuries had transformed the old ways of living that we begin to find them in common use. Representations of seats are found in the sculptures and paintings of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and all through the middle ages—many of them elaborate and luxurious—but their use was confined to the noble and wealthy. In church furniture chairs are familiar throughout the middle ages, but they were usually fixed parts of the building. The seats of the common people were probably constructed of rude blocks, or of single planks joined together with little finish or skill.
In England, even so late as the sixteenth century, chairs as we know them were of so rare occurrence as to be handed down from generation to generation, and of such importance as to be frequently mentioned in wills and deeds. Such chairs were of the rudest forms, ornamented, however, with embroideries and costly stuffs. In the middle of the seventeenth century it was customary even at royal banquets for all but the king and queen to be seated upon benches without cushions. In the reign of Charles I., however, with the encouragement of luxurious living, chairs became more common among the favored classes, and under the Commonwealth, with its levelling of class distinctions, their use was extended. But in the latter period the revulsion against unnecessary ornament and display simplified the models. With the Restoration there was a return to the opposite extreme. The growing taste for ease and luxury brought into requisition the richest fabrics obtainable, and we find stuffed seats and backs, with Turkish embroideries and heavily brocaded velvets. Chairs were elaborately carved and gilded. French furniture was imported and copied, and the influence of Indian art, through the recent acquisition of Bombay, can be easily traced. Of the simpler patterns, those made of turned spindles became common at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Forms were borrowed and adapted from many sources, from France, Spain and Holland. In the time of William and Mary, under Dutch influence, the seats and backs were broadened, colored inlay introduced, and the cabriole legs commonly employed, suggesting the forms later adopted in the Chippendale period. The strong point of English furniture was not its originality, but its catholicity. It was a mirror which reflected the outcome of other times and countries in a frame of its own.