American Antique Chairs
American Antique Chairs
Chairs
Chairs are often the most characteristic example of a given style era and therefore further space is devoted to them here than other pieces of furniture. Furthermore so many chairs have been made that more have survived than other antiques.
Few seats were made with backs before the middle of the seventeenth century. Most people sat on stools, benches, or chests. The few chairs with backs and armrests were much like a throne. Often these chairs had a raised knob on the end of the armrest which helped give the person seated in it additional authority and power. Only the head of the household and very important guests were allowed to sit in such a chair.
Of the three principal types of seventeenth century Pilgrim chair — the turned chair, panelled chair, and Cromwell chair — the most popular was the turned chair. These are now often called Carver or Brewster chairs by experts. These chairs have a double row of rails for the back-
rest and armrest and beneath the seat. A variant of these are the slatted back chairs brought to America from Holland and Germany.
Chairs with backs became the norm during the William and Mary style era. These high backs were often upholstered with fabric, leather, or cane. The Gaines family of Portsmouth introduced their own William and Mary style design of which the five flat rails are most characteristic. Those examples of the ‘banister’ chairs with four rails in the back are made by other people. The chairs got the name because the rails of the backrest resembled banister rails. Mahogany and walnut lent themselves best to the carving of minute ornamentation.
The earliest known lounging chair was made in New York around 1708. The chair has a straight backrest with a curved top which is flattened at the top. The rungs are turned and the legs are of Spanish style.
The best known and cheapest example of this type of seating is the ‘Boston chair’ with its slightly curving backrest that is sometimes known as ‘crooked back’. Its frame is often painted red or black.
Towards the end of the William and Mary period the Boston chair got a more oval backrest. This characteristic was carried forward into Queen Anne.
During the Queen Anne period regional variations became apparent. Although everyone stuck to the new more rounded forms that are characteristic of the Queen Anne style, its application varied widely. Extensive ornamentation was used in the south and in Philadelphia but in Boston and Connecticut much more sober results were produced. The backrest was crested in Newport and New York, often with a shell form. The ‘lost’ space of the backrest universally had the form of a bird’s head.
Generally Philadelphia chairs were the most robust because the joints were made with pegged double mortise and tenon. The Queen Anne style brought with it greater comfort. The severe furniture of the Pilgrims was put aside often to be replaced by upholstered seating with Queen Anne style backrests.
Chippendale style chairs, which became fashionable around 1755, introduced important changes in terms of both form and ornament. The seat was usually rectangular and well upholstered. The straight sides of the chair back contrasted with the arched form of the Queen Anne style. Regional variations were chiefly in the manner in which the central splat and the ball and claw feet were made. Central splats with ‘owl’s eyes’ originated from Massachusetts.
The Connecticut makers continued to employ shells and scrolls. In the south there was a preference for graceful geometric forms and in Philadelphia they carved minute hairs on the claw feet. In New York the claws continued through the ball and with Newport chairs the fearsome long and sharp claws remained apparent. At this time lounging chairs were mainly bedroom furniture. Only the extensively sculpted feet related to the Chippendale style.
The ‘lolling chair’ or ‘Martha Washington’ chair from Massachusetts combined aspects of both Chippendale and Federal styles. This type of chair had a Chippendale style upholstered back with tapering turned legs in the Federal style. The straight back and thin wooden armrests do not make this such a comfortable lounging chair as its name suggests.
In the first decades of the Federal style dining room chairs had three types of back: the shield, rectangular, or oval back. Although Federal style furniture is generally of light construction American
Federal style is finer than European examples.
The upholstered seat was stretched over a wooden frame and held in place by bronze tacks. In comparison with Chippendale style there were few regional variations. Except in New England hardly anyone continued to use foot rails that had featured in previous styles. The main form of decoration was mosaic. The `scrollback’ chair appeared in 1805. This was a forerunner of the revival by the Empire style of the ancient Greek klismos chair. The side rails of the chair back are decoratively scrolled towards the rear.
Duncan Phyfe was the leading maker of scrollback chairs. His workshop with its 100 employees made so many of them that they can still be widely found. The Empire style brought about further development and wider acceptance of the scrollback chair. These chairs had a continuous line from the top of the back to the bottom of the legs. In Boston these chairs were given a superbly carved garland and rolled top lath. Extensive carving was less popular in New York yet the central splat is often carved to form a lyre, harp, cornucopia, or an eagle. Instead of the rectangular legs that dominated elsewhere, Baltimore makers preferred rounded legs.
Many American notables such as Thomas Jefferson liked to sit in their ’sling seat’ armchair or ‘campeachy’ chair. This type of chair rested on a cross-form base and was in existence in ancient Egypt. The Romans refined this type of seating by introducing curvilinear form. Campeachy chairs were mainly made in New York, between 1810 and 1820. During the French Restoration era dining room chairs were noticeably French gondola formed with amenable curved backs. Side rails that were curved forwards were intended as armrests.
The ‘Voltaire’ chair from this era is well-known. This is an easy chair with a sloping and curved back that was thickly upholstered. Many of these chairs were set on castors which is reminiscent of modern office chairs.
The Americans appear to have agreed with Voltaire that this was an excellent type of chair in which to sit and think. In any event they were widely sold. The emphasis shifted at this time to thick upholstery and this trend was to continue for a long time.
Rocking chairs
Americans are very proud that they invented one of the most popular forms of furniture — the rocking chair. It is no longer possible to ascertain who actually created the first rocking chair but the story that Benjamin Franklin was the first in 1787 to have had curved rails set under a chair is not true. An earlier bill from the furniture maker William Savery of 1774 bears the inscription: ‘to putting rockers on a chair’ for which the charge was one shilling and sixpence.
The rocking chair was brought back into fashion in the 1960s by President Kennedy but furniture makers had started putting curved rockers under existing chairs from the beginning of the eighteenth century to make them more comfortable.
These early rocking chairs were known as ‘carpet cutters’ because of the damage done to carpets by repeated rocking in the same place. Rocking chairs existed in whatever style was in vogue such as Windsor, slat back, and banister. Rockers were fixed by notching the legs of the chair which were then fixed to the rockers. This was used for attaching rockers to chairs that had not been made as rockers.
American 19th century child’s rocking potty chair.
Soon chairs were being expressly designed and made as rocking chairs. These often had heavier duty legs which were jointed to the rockers themselves. These chairs were also often broader with some being up to three times as wide as the early ‘carpet cutters’.
Rocking chairs are usually not upholstered and the seats are normally of wood or rush. In order to sit on a soft seat cushions were added.
Most rocking chairs had armrests but the Shakers — renowned for their frugal lifestyle — found this too much of a good thing. They made rocking chairs without armrests and relatively low chair backs. The Shakers were the first to widely use rocking chairs as bedroom chairs for elderly sisters and brethren of the sect, but soon every bedroom had a rocking chair. This led to disagreement with the Shaker Philemon Stewart asking why the Shaker’s used so many rocking chairs, suggesting that generation might not be able to find God’s way while it sought to make life so easy.
The Boston rocker is a popular form of rocking chair with the earliest known example of this Windsor style chair being made in 1830, probably in Connecticut. The rolled seat is characteristic of these chairs, with the front of the seat curved inwards and the rear curving upwards. Collectors and art historians are particularly interested in the decorations on the chair back and armrests that were often done in gold paint.
These decorations vary from the normal Windsor chairs that traditionally used baskets of fruit, floral motifs, or cornucopia. Instead Boston (known since the War of Independence for the many revolutionaries) stencilled images of important persons, landscapes, and houses on these chairs.
Sea captains who wanted to rock to-and-fro when on dry land took Boston rockers to every corner of globe.
Soon the grandmother knitting in her rocking chair or spinning a yarn became a familiar sight throughout the world. The best way to determine if a rocking chair is genuine or converted is to compare the history of paint on the chair with that of the rockers. If the rockers have fewer layers of paint than the chair then it is almost certain the rockers had been added later.
American cane-backed rocker, circa 1880.