Now I Sit Me Down

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  In memory of Michael Graves

  All men recline for rest, and must walk about upon their errands in this world. Yet how they sit, during ceremonies, while eating, or in their hours of labor and leisure, is what distinguishes them from their neighbors; and this distinction we feel deeply somehow to be fundamental.

  —George N. Kates, Chinese Household Furniture

  A chair is only finished when someone sits in it.

  —Hans J. Wegner

  Introduction

  I own a creaky old wooden office chair that swivels, tilts, and rolls. I bought it in a flea market more than thirty years ago to use as a writing chair or, rather, as a typing chair, for at that time I used a Hermes portable. My first computer was an Osborne, followed by a succession of PCs, each more powerful and more versatile than its predecessor. Now I write on a Mac. The Osborne is stored in an attic cupboard, although I’m not sure why I hang on to it. Valore sentimentale, the Italians would say. My Osborne has a monochrome screen the size of a postcard, uses an obscure computer language, stores information on plastic floppies, and runs obsolete software. In other words, it is twenty-three pounds of useless junk. On the other hand, my old office chair is still usable. It’s a so-called banker’s chair, with a scooped seat, curved arms, and a contoured back, a design that first appeared in Edwardian England. You won’t find other artifacts from that period in my home—no antimacassars or spittoons, no gasoliers or Victrolas—yet my banker’s chair continues to do its job.

  A chair can be a living link to the past. Even the distant past. I would feel odd wearing a Greek chiton, and I wouldn’t know how to consult the sibyl of the oracle at Delphi, but like Achilles and Odysseus I can sit on a klismos, the ancient Greek chair. The one I recently used wasn’t a precious antique but came from JCPenney. That’s not unusual. Ours may be a digital age, but we continue to manufacture and use period chairs: wing chairs, rocking chairs, Windsor chairs.

  There is good reason to copy the klismos—you have to jump ahead more than two thousand years to the English cabriole of the eighteenth century to find a chair of equal elegance. Other candidates might include a Louis XV armchair, the fin de siècle Viennese café chair, and the mid-century modern Eames chair. And there are many lesser useful chairs: club chairs, reclining chairs, deck chairs.

  Chairs are fascinating because they address both physiology and fashion. They represent an effort to balance multiple concerns: artistry, status, gravity, construction, and—not least—comfort. Chairs can be whimsical or blandly practical, luxurious or simple, a frill or a necessity. My short history chronicles many changes in chair design, but unlike communications equipment, transportation technology, and weaponry, which have become more efficient, faster, and deadlier over time, chairs do not necessarily get “better”; some models persist unchanged for centuries. On the other hand, chair design is not static. Change is caused by the availability of new materials, by new social conditions, by new production methods, and by new uses. It is also caused by new fashions as well as the desire for novelty, and periodically by spurts of the inventive human imagination, which is never satisfied to leave “well enough” alone.

  As chairmaking evolved from individual craftsmen, to guilds, and finally to industrial production, the responsibility for design shifted. Since the nineteenth century, many chairs have been designed by architects. This was largely a result of the Arts and Crafts movement, in which architects designed furnishings, wallpapers, lamps, even table services, to complement their interiors. Like a building, a chair combines artistry and function. Unlike a building, however, a chair’s fate is at the mercy of its users. A building may turn out to be unpopular or impractical, but once it is built we are stuck with it—demolition is only rarely an option. A chair, on the other hand, is different; if it is disliked it will be set aside, manufacturers will discontinue making it, and it will soon be forgotten. But if it garners favor, it—or rather its design—can survive for centuries. Banker’s chairs continue to be made today, as are bentwood café chairs, and many Danish Modern chairs. Unlike most consumer goods, chair models can have a long life; some never go out of fashion. Or, like the JCPenney klismos, they reappear to function just as their original makers intended.

  * * *

  This book is not a conventional design history; it is as much a chronicle of human behavior as of human artifacts. The first chapter traces the evolution of the simplest sitting implement—the stool—and shows how every period copies or adapts what came before, all the way back to pharaonic Egypt. Next, an overview of domestic furniture reminds us that there are many kinds of chairs because there are so many different reasons to sit. This leads to a theme that is a constant in my story: the chair is a practical tool, but it can also be an aesthetic object—cherished, admired, even collected. Finally, there is nothing natural about sitting on chairs—after all, many societies prefer to sit on the floor. Why do we sit up on chairs? The story of how the ancient Chinese switched from floor-sitting to chair-sitting sheds light on this matter.

  The middle portion of the book traces the story of the chair from prehistoric times to the present day. It does not attempt to be comprehensive but touches on the high points: the progression of the simple side chair from a glorified stool to the refined British cabriole chair; the golden age of sitting furniture in Louis XV’s France; the appearance of exemplary folk models such as the English Windsor chair and the American rocker; the saga of Michael Thonet, who invented the long-lasting bentwood café chair; the advent of the modern designer, whose work was separated—for the first time—from actual chairmaking; the mid-century Danish Modern movement, which combined traditional craftsmanship with factory production. Individuals make an appearance: Thomas Chippendale, author of influential furniture handbooks; the ébéniste Jean-François Oeben, who raised furniture-making to a fine art; the first designers, such as the turn-of-the-century Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann; the Bauhaus maven Marcel Breuer; Charles and Ray Eames, who pioneered chairs in new materials; and the Danish master Hans Wegner. These individuals are a reminder that chairs often involve invention as well as artistry, and that new solutions are produced not only by circumstances but also by creative minds.

  The final chapters explore special chairs. Chairs that fold—safari chairs, director’s chairs, lawn chairs—are so ubiquitous that they are almost invisible, yet portability and chairs emerged hand in hand in ancient Egypt and dynastic China. Knockdown furniture was developed simply for ease of transport but has ended up as a marketing phenomenon. We think of swings as children’s playthings, but swinging seats likewise have ancient roots and have persisted in the form of porch swings and gliders. Finally, chairs on wheels, whether for infants or invalids, demonstrate how human ingenuity can adapt an everyday object to special uses.

  While we continue to use chairs based on historical models—chaises longues, easy chairs, rocking chairs—two dissimilar
chairs represent our period’s particular, one might say peculiar, contribution: the recliner and the ergonomic task chair. While one is used mainly for watching television and the other for desk work, both are based on a systematic study of the human body and represent new solutions to age-old problems: people come in different sizes, and comfortable sitting requires that we are able to easily alter our position. In both chairs mechanical adjustability provides an answer.

  Chairs are affected by—and reflect—changes in technology, materials, and economic and social conditions, yet they remain intimately connected to peculiarities of the human body—after all, we sit on them. At the same time, chairs communicate a lot about our attitudes—toward comfort, toward status, toward our physical surroundings. They are inanimate objects, but they speak to us. What they say is the subject of this book.

  ONE

  A Tool for Sitting

  François Boucher is best known for his idealized paintings of beguiling odalisques and cavorting maidens, and for his languorous portraits of his patroness Madame de Pompadour, but my favorite Boucher is a domestic scene. A pair of women is sitting by a window in a small but elegant room, the boudoir of a Parisian apartment. A servant wearing an apron has just finished pouring hot chocolate from a pewter pot; you can see the steam rising from the cups. He probably brought the drink from a nearby shop, for bunched carelessly on the mantelpiece is the napkin in which the pot was wrapped. The lady of the house, a delicate beauty wearing a morning gown and a makeup cape, is offering a spoonful to her little son. Her companion, a young nursemaid, is holding a baby girl. It is a charming depiction of an intimate family moment—the embodiment of bourgeois domesticity.

  Boucher painted Le déjeuner in 1739.1 He regularly used his wife, Marie-Jeanne, and their children Juste-Nathan and Elisabeth-Victoire as models, and the setting is likely his own home. The room embodies tasteful but not luxurious comfort, and delights in visual effects. The large pier glass set into the paneling above the fireplace reflects a doorway and a divided portiere, or door curtain, a common feature of fashionable homes. The walls are decorated with sea-green crackle-painted paneling and gilded rocaille moldings. The pale morning light pours in through the tall window, but one can imagine the room in the evening, flickering candlelight multiplied by the gilded moldings and the mirror. The rocaille decoration, the chinoiseries, and the shapely mirror frame signal the advent of rococo taste—a new fashion. The decor was likely designed by Boucher himself, for, in addition to being a successful painter, he was also an accomplished decorator.

  The boudoir is full of stuff: a delicate red-and-black lacquered tea-table, a gilded console table, a pair of candle sconces, an ormolu wall clock, oriental knickknacks, porcelain cups and saucers. “In effect, the only tokens of history continually available to our senses are the desirable things made by men,” observed the Yale art historian George Kubler in his classic The Shape of Time. “Of course, to say that man-made things are desirable is redundant,” he continued, “because man’s native inertia is overcome only by desire, and nothing gets made unless it is desirable.” It was Kubler’s thesis that desirable things not only mark the shape of time—in his happy phrase—but whether they are an opera by Rameau, a play by Molière, or a painting by Boucher, they also provide us with a window on the past.

  Boucher documented a time when visual delight was combined with practicality. The eighteenth century excelled in furniture, and while the two caned side chairs in the painting are plain by the luxurious standards of the time, they look comfortable and the caning makes them light enough to be easily moved—the furniture arrangement near the window looks like a last-minute improvisation: “Let’s have our chocolate over here.”

  The Humble Stool

  Boucher’s little boy, who is holding a pull toy in the shape of a little horse—another desirable thing—is sitting on a low stool. Actually, it is a repose-pied, an upholstered footstool, but it serves him perfectly well as a seat. Stools are the simplest form of sitting furniture. There are several in our home: a counter-height stool in the kitchen, a low stool in the bathroom, and a pair in the dressing room. The stool in my study has been piled high with books for months, but that doesn’t matter—it’s only a stool. Stools probably first saw the light of day as flat slabs of wood with three pegged legs; three because floors were uneven. Simple stools existed—and exist—in all rural cultures; they are easy to make and serve a variety of uses, from peeling potatoes to milking cows.

  In seventeenth-century England, the first everyday chairs were called “backstools,” because they were stools into which a straight board had been inset to support the sitter’s back. Backstools continued to be used throughout the eighteenth century in rural Europe and America, their lack of comfort made up for by the simplicity of their construction. Such primitive chairs were descendants of the fifteenth-century sgabello, a fancy backstool found in the palazzi of Italian noblemen, whose coat of arms often adorned the carved backpiece. A simplified version called a stabelle can still be found in homes and country inns in present-day Alpine regions of Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.

  Sgabello, fifteenth century

  A particular version of the stool that has survived over the centuries is the folding camp stool. Today, such stools are used mainly by fishermen, campers, and weekend painters, but before their adoption as portable seats for recreation, they served a different purpose. Folding campaign stools appear in many Civil War photographs of military encampments. A century earlier, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered eighteen folding stools from a Philadelphia upholsterer for his headquarters; one of these stools is on display at the Smithsonian.

  The folding camp stool in the L.L.Bean catalog is virtually identical to Washington’s stool except that it is made of aluminum tubes and ballistic nylon instead of wood and leather. The ingenious design has persisted because it is hard to improve. Lightweight and easily portable, with intersecting legs that fold flat when not in use but are stable when unfolded, the X-frame ensures that the fabric seat remains taut no matter the weight of the sitter. The design inspired the form of the starkly elegant stool that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed for the German pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. The leather cushion is supported by straps stretched between polished stainless steel X-frames, although the crossed legs do not fold. In addition to four stools, the pavilion contained two chairs of similar design that were reserved for King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugénie of Spain when they formally opened the building.

  The furniture arrangement in the Barcelona pavilion followed historical precedent: Napoleon Bonaparte’s throne room at the Château de Fontainebleau has two rows of upholstered X-frame stools, or taborets, but only one chair—the emperor’s throne. The striking contrast between Napoleon’s throne and the lesser stools is a reminder that status and sitting furniture are never far apart. Throughout history, grander, taller, more impressive chairs have been a mark of distinction, and their use has been a privilege reserved for the select few.

  Napoleon’s furniture maker modeled the taboret on the Renaissance scissors chair, whose legs were a series of intersecting curved wooden frames that extended up to support armrests. Sometimes the chair was foldable, sometimes not; sometimes it had a flat backrest. Renaissance scissors chairs were beautifully carved, often with expensive inlays of ivory, metal, and boxwood, and were reserved for nobility. When Andrea Mantegna painted The Court of Gonzaga, in the 1470s, he showed the Gonzaga family and courtiers gathered on an outdoor terrace. Only the marquis and his wife are seated, everyone else is standing. Her chair is hidden by her voluminous dress, but his scissors chair, covered in embroidered velvet, is plainly visible, as is a puppy lying contentedly between its curved legs. More than four centuries later, when Jacob Ezekiel sculpted the American financier Anthony J. Drexel, he portrayed the international banker and patron of the arts as a latter-day Medici by placing him on a Renaissance scissors chair.2


  “Everything made now is either a replica or a variant of something made a little time ago and so on back without break to the first morning of human time,” observed Kubler, who distinguished between replicas, which were simply copies of earlier devices, and variants, which were modifications. The scissors chair was a replica of the medieval faldstool. Meaning literally “folding chair,” this X-frame portable throne accompanied kings, bishops, and other dignitaries on their frequent travels. Faldstools are mentioned several times in the Song of Roland; one of ivory, another—belonging to Charlemagne—of solid gold. The oldest surviving faldstool, which belonged to the seventh-century Merovingian king Dagobert, is made of cast bronze. The faldstool was a replica of the ancient Roman sella curulis, a ceremonial folding stool used by consuls, senators, and high magistrates. The curule was elaborately decorated and carved and was sometimes provided with arms, but it must have been uncomfortable if used for long periods for it had no back, a feature said to be intended to discourage overlong deliberation.

  Renaissance scissors chair

  The curule was a variant of the folding stool used by Roman military commanders in the field—a badge of rank as well as a seat. The Romans copied this stool from the Greeks. Stools (diphroi), both folding and four-legged, were a common feature of Greek life and were used by all strata of society—even the gods in the Parthenon frieze sit on stools. A vase painting from the fifth century B.C. shows a woman with a parasol sitting on a folding stool, apparently taking part in a picnic. A mural in the Minoan Palace of Knossos on Crete, dating from the fifteenth century B.C., portrays several young men seated on folding stools, drinking wine. When the archaeologist Arthur Evans discovered the mural, he christened it the Camp Stool Fresco.