Now I Sit Me Down Read online

  Roman curule

  No actual Greek or Minoan folding stools have survived, but fragments of ancient folding stools have been found in funerary barrows in Germany and Sweden, and an intact Bronze Age folding stool was unearthed in an archaeological dig in Guldhoj, Denmark. The X-frame is ash wood and a fragment of the seat is otter skin. Scholars have debated if this stool is a Scandinavian invention, or if, like the folding stools of the Greeks and Minoans, it was a cultural import—a replica. If it was the latter, it traveled a great distance, because, as far as we know, the folding stool appeared first in pharaonic Egypt.

  I visit the Egyptian collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where I find two wall paintings that portray men on folding stools. One is from the tomb of a high official and shows him supervising workers on his estate. The other, also from the tomb of a government functionary, depicts a group of young army recruits sitting on folding stools waiting to have their hair shorn. Evidently, the Egyptians used folding stools as everyday outdoor seats—not so different from today’s camp stools—and they do not appear to have been badges of rank; many wall paintings depict stools being used by workers and artisans. On the other hand, an actual folding stool that is displayed in another of the Met galleries was clearly a luxury item: the frame is elaborately carved in the form of long-billed birds and is made of wood inlaid with ebony and ivory. This stool dates from the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom (1550–1295 B.C.).

  Eighteenth-dynasty folding stool frame

  One of the wall paintings that catches my eye shows a carpenter sitting on a stool, using a bow-drill, with an adze and square close to hand. He is building a chair. There are many examples of Egyptian chairs at the Met, with and without arms, often beautifully carved, usually with woven cane seats, sometimes with seat cushions, occasionally combined with footstools. Unlike stools, chairs appear to have been reserved for the exclusive use of important personages. During the early Middle Kingdom, an unusual type of chair emerged with a backrest only a few inches high, just enough to support the pelvis and sacrum, leaving the back free to find its own angle of repose.3 None of these chairs has survived, but judging from graphic evidence it appears that the backrest may have been padded. This kind of seat appears in scores of statues, reliefs, and wall paintings of pharaohs, royalty, and other dignitaries. Indeed, the Egyptian hieroglyph for “revered person” depicted a noble seated in a chair. The chair man.

  My Chairs

  I don’t consider myself a collector, but I estimate that over a lifetime I’ve owned more than sixty chairs. A recent acquisition is a side chair that my wife, Shirley, and I bought last year in a consignment shop. Dating from the early 1900s and vaguely Arts and Crafts in style, it has a delicate tiger oak frame and a caned seat. It is a classic side chair: the front legs are straight, the rear legs are splayed and extend up to form the back, which is slightly angled. The legs are reinforced by delicate stretchers. The chair is pretty to look at but is rarely sat on for it serves as our “bedroom chair,” that is, it’s where we hang our clothes at night. The twentieth-century Danish furniture designer Hans Wegner once designed a three-legged chair especially for this purpose—not a chair used as a clothes hanger but a clothes valet designed like a chair. The top rail is shaped like a coat hanger to receive a jacket, and when lifted the hinged seat serves as a place to hang one’s trousers—and reveals a small tray for keys and change. And you can still sit down to lace your shoes.

  Chairs are used in so many different ways. The chairs in my study are handy places to stack books. Chairs are always useful when you have to reach something on a high shelf. Henri Matisse once painted his assistant in his Nice studio using a side chair as an improvised easel. The Morning Session shows her working on a canvas that is leaning against the chairback; she has placed her palette on the seat. The easel-chair and the chair she is sitting on will probably soon be used for lunch.

  Valet Chair (Hans Wegner)

  A dining chair is the simplest of chairs. It must be the right height for a table, and it must accommodate a person sitting erect for a limited period of time; it doesn’t need much padding, and arms are optional. A dining chair needs to be light enough to be easily pulled up to the table as you sit down—and pushed away as you get up. In the past, dining chairs in grand homes were heavy because there was a footman available to slide the chair under the sitters (waiters in expensive restaurants still provide this service). Our bentwood dining chairs are very light. They’re not all in the dining room, there are a couple in the breakfast room and a couple in the sunroom, and they get moved around a lot, depending on how many guests there are for dinner.

  I’ve built a dining table and several desks over the years, including the worktable on which I’m writing this. The maple-veneer plywood top is supported by a maple apron and tapered legs. Its Shaker-like simplicity has less to do with design philosophy than with my limited carpentry skills. While I have occasionally turned my hand to stools and benches, I’ve never built a chair. “The chair is a very difficult object,” Mies van der Rohe once observed. “Everyone who has ever tried to make one knows that.” A chair requires strong joints—dovetail, mortise and tenon, finger—and it has to be light enough to move and strong enough to carry a couple of hundred pounds. A well-built chair will support a person tilting back on its two rear legs—although my wife scolds me whenever I do this. Most important, a chair has to be comfortable. It has to allow movement and also provide support in all the right places, which requires subtle curves and carefully shaped slats and rails.

  The chair in which I spend the most time is the chair I sit on while writing. A desk chair is more demanding than a dining chair because it has to accommodate a variety of postures: sitting upright to type, leaning forward to consult a book, leaning back to think about what to write next. A desk chair also has to be comfortable for longer periods of time, but not too comfortable—after all, it’s a work chair. Thomas Jefferson, who was interested in furniture, had a swivel desk chair when he was secretary of state. “Who has not heard from the Secretary of the praises of his wonderful Whirlgig Chair, which had the miraculous quality of allowing the person seated in it to turn his head without moving his tail?” wrote one observer.

  Jefferson certainly qualified as a chair collector. When he returned from his five-year stint as minister to France, he brought back no fewer than fifty-seven chairs. These included side chairs and upholstered easy chairs. The last made ideal reading chairs, for the invention of upholstery in France and England coincides with the rise in popularity of reading for pleasure. A good reading chair must be comfortable, above all, and its design should allow the relaxed reader to become fully absorbed in the printed page. My own favorite is a wing chair. The upholstered seat, back, and sides create not only physical comfort but also the feeling of being in a secluded little retreat. Jefferson’s cosy reading chair, which stood in his library at Monticello, was a barrel-shaped easy chair upholstered in red leather.

  Watching television is very different from reading. Our attention is focused on a small—or not so small—screen, and we are immobile for several hours, which may be why the chair most associated with television-watching—the recliner—resembles an airplane seat. I don’t have a recliner—I use a rocking chair—but like many viewers I like to put my feet up. Although footstools have been used since Egyptian times, the padded ottoman is a relatively new accessory, arriving in Europe in the late eighteenth century from Turkey.4 Jefferson, who loved newfangled gadgets, had one of those, too; indeed, his record-book entry—“Paid for an Ottomane of velours d’Utrecht”—is the first written evidence we have of the use of that word in English.

  My wife watches television in a chaise longue that resembles a daybed with an adjustable back, although as the name suggests, it was originally conceived as a “long chair,” long enough to support the legs—a marriage of easy chair and ottoman. Chaises longues were common in eighteenth-century bourgeois homes—Boucher once painted his prett
y wife reclining in a duchesse, a daybed with one end designed like an armchair. French chaises longues had a variety of names—all feminine—depending on their precise design: veilleuse, sultane, turquoise, méridienne. The recamier had a raised back at each end and is named after the chaise longue in Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait of Juliette Récamier. Such chairs were commonly found in salons as well as boudoirs, and were chiefly used by women. This was not the case with canapés, or sofas, which were a variant of the chaise longue and appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A charming pastel by François-Xavier Vispré shows a young man reclining on a canapé while reading a book. He is wearing a casual banyan and bright red slippers, and is stretched out full-length, comfortably propped up by a pile of cushions.

  Recamier chaise longue

  Chairs need to accommodate different activities—reading, writing, dining, socializing, watching television—as well as different postures—sitting up, lounging, reclining. But they also need to satisfy something else. As the architect Christopher Alexander has observed, “What is less obvious, and yet perhaps most important of all, is this: we project our moods and personalities into the chairs we sit in. In one mood a big fat chair is just right; in another mood, a rocking chair; for another, a stiff upright; and yet again, a stool or sofa.” This emotional connection occurs because a chair, unlike a table or a chest of drawers, has a personality. It is not only a tool. We choose a hammer—a tack hammer, a claw hammer, a mallet—depending on the job at hand. But as Alexander writes, the job of sitting is not purely functional; it reflects our state of mind. The astonishing historical variety of chairs is as much due to this intimate relationship as to functional imperatives.

  An Unusual Tool

  The personality of a chair can vary. It can communicate status—“I am important”—like an executive desk chair or an armchair at the head of the table. Or cultural values—“I admire the classical world” or “I like modern design.” Because a chair is a part of everyday life, it is susceptible to changing tastes and fashions, which may explain the disappearance of the scissors chair and the periodic reappearance of the folding stool. A chair can also reflect changing cultural habits. The nineteenth-century popularity of rocking chairs, for example, paralleled the sociable custom of sitting on the porch, just as deck chairs accompanied ocean travel and outdoor recreation.

  The chair is a barometer of human behavior and attitudes to posture. Do we want to recline, lounge, slouch, or sit upright? Do we seek status or comfort? Or both? The chair answers these questions. It is sometimes an anonymous product, but it can also be the result of an individual’s imagination—Jefferson’s in the eighteenth century, Mies van der Rohe’s and Hans Wegner’s in the twentieth.

  George Kubler pointed out that works of art can be both the answer to a question and a reformulation of that question.

  Every important work of art can be regarded both as a historical event and as a hard-won solution to some problem. It is irrelevant now whether the event was original or conventional, accidental or willed, awkward or skillful. The important clue is that any solution points to the existence of some problem to which there have been other solutions, and that other solutions to this same problem will most likely be invented to follow the one now in view. As the solutions accumulate the problem alters. The chain of solutions nevertheless discloses the problem.

  So, too, with chairs. We don’t know exactly what led the ancient Egyptians to invent the stool. It may have been something as simple as a need to sit down when performing certain tasks, such as carpentry. We do know that sitting on a chair was associated with ceremonies, and it was likely the need for a portable throne that resulted in the ingenious folding stool. What Kubler called a “chain of solutions” involving status and portability led to the Roman curule and the Renaissance scissors chair and, in a curious offshoot, produced the Hollywood director’s chair, a portable seat reserved for the director or star, whose name was prominently stenciled on the back. The chaise longue, on the other hand, was the answer to elegant repose. It redefined posture as half sitting, half reclining, and ultimately led to the sofa and the lounge chair. The chaise longue was ill-suited to the out-of-doors, however—you couldn’t drag it out onto the beach. The solution was a folding chair that combined supine comfort with light weight and easy portability: the deck chair. The wood-and-canvas deck chair did not require new materials or new technology. It was loosely based on the Egyptian X-frame stool, but cleverly added foldable armrests and an adjustable back. Watching someone struggling to unfold a deck chair is to be reminded of its intricate geometry.

  A complicated little contraption—and something more. The contrast between the hard, scissorlike frame and the floppy canvas defines the character of this mechanical yet carefree chair. The latter quality is underlined by the gaily striped fabric—who thought of that? Even the humblest chair can inspire an aesthetic impulse. Will the armrest be smooth or carved, will the finish be glossy varnish or sparkling gilt, should the upholstery be patterned or plain, ought the graceful leg to curve this way or that? In other words, this is a tool with an artistic dimension.

  TWO

  If You Sit on It, Can It Still Be Art?

  Beautiful chairs are aesthetic objects, but of what kind? We refer to artifacts such as the ormolu clock and the gilded console table in Boucher’s Le déjeuner as “applied” art, to distinguish them from the painting itself, which we call “fine” art. The dictionary defines applied art as “the application of design and decoration to everyday objects to make them aesthetically pleasing,” a distinction that seems to be mainly a question of function—or its lack. Boucher’s painting, which graced the walls of a series of private homes before ending up in the Louvre, provides visual and intellectual stimulation but has no practical purpose. A pretty ormolu clock, on the other hand, is a tool for telling time, just as a caned chair is a tool for sitting.

  The distinction between function and aesthetics is not simple, however. Boucher was a painter, but as we have seen, he was also a decorator, and he regularly carried out commissions for tapestries, porcelain figurines, and book illustrations, as well as theater costumes and sets. Jean-Honoré Fragonard was not above painting panels and overdoors as part of interior decoration. The women’s dresses that Antoine Watteau depicted in his idyllic scenes inspired actual fashions, and gave rise to the so-called Watteau pleat. For these artists—and their patrons—the line between art and everyday objects was not hard and fast.

  One of the last works of the great cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben was a dressing table for Madame de Pompadour (now at the Metropolitan Museum). The table is of a particular type invented by Oeben. At first glance it appears to be a simple writing desk with an elaborately decorated top. But the desk contains surprises. Insert a crank, turn it, and an internal clockwork mechanism causes the top to magically slide back and the central portion to slide forward. Two side compartments hold perfumes, powders, and cosmetics. Push a discreet button and a central leather-covered panel tilts up at an angle. The panel has a ledge and can serve as a bookrest, or it can be pivoted to reveal a looking glass. Push another button and a shallow drawer pops out below. The ornamental marquetry of the various parts, like everything else about this exquisite contraption, is dazzling. Pompadour was a great patroness of the arts, and Oeben’s marquetry depicts a vase of flowers surrounded by the emblems of her creative interests: a building plan and architectural instruments, a painter’s palette and brushes, a musical score, a garden rake and watering can.

  Such marriages of beauty and convenience were commonplace in the eighteenth-century interior. Rooms were all of a piece: the floor parquetry, the stucco ceilings, the paneled walls, the tapestries and painted silk wall coverings, the branched candle sconces and chandeliers, and, of course, the furniture. The individuals responsible—the cabinetmakers, upholsterers, varnishers, lacquerers, silversmiths, goldsmiths, and locksmiths—each had their own guild with its own clearly defined respon
sibilities and apprenticeship requirements. Architects, painters, and sculptors were also part of this team. Art and decor complemented each other: paintings took their place as panels, overmantels, overdoors, and ceilings. Framed paintings and mirror glass were an integral part of the decorating scheme, and architects’ drawings indicated their precise locations: flanking a canopy bed, or centered over a console table. None of this is to belittle art, but rather to emphasize that practicality and beauty were not considered mutually exclusive. The marquetry of a dressing table was expected to provide the same visual delight as a painted canvas—and vice versa.

  The eighteenth-century novelist and playwright Françoise de Graffigny has left us a firsthand description of a rococo interior. She was visiting a recently decorated country house in Champagne in the winter of 1738, and in a letter to a friend she recorded her impressions of her hostess’s appartement.

  Her bedroom is paneled and painted light yellow, with pale blue moldings; an alcove of the same, framed with delightful Indian [meaning Chinese] paper. The bed is in blue moiré and everything matches so that even the dog basket is yellow and blue, like the chair frames, writing desk, corner cupboards and secretaire. The looking-glasses with silver frames, everything is wonderfully polished. A large door, glazed with looking-glass, leads to the library, which is not yet finished. Its carving is as precious as a snuffbox. There will be looking-glasses, paintings by Veronese, etc. One side of the alcove is a small boudoir; you fall on your knees when you go in. The paneling is blue, and the ceiling has been painted and lacquered by a pupil of Martin, who has been here for the last three years. All the small panels have paintings by Watteau; these are the Five Senses; then two fables by Lafontaine, Le baiser pris et rendu, of which I had the engravings, and Les oies de Frère Philippe. Ah! what paintings! The frames are gilt and pierced to show the paneling. There are the Three Graces, a chimney-piece diagonally in the corner, and corner cupboards by Martin, with beautiful objects on them, including an amber desk-set which the Prince of Prussia sent him with some poems: I’ll tell you about that later. The only furniture is a large armchair covered with white taffeta, and two matching stools; for, by God’s grace, I haven’t seen a bergère in the entire house.