Imagery and ornamentation

Painted and plastic images, or ornamental decoration, on furniture are secondary processes compared with construction and design. Some of the best and most expressive furniture forms, such as the Greek klismos chair and the English Windsor chair, are quite independent of imagery or ornamentation. On the other hand, no period in the history of furniture is entirely devoid of these secondary processes.

All furniture decoration is normally concentrated where it will not be in the way; for example, on the legs, arms, and backs of chairs; on the ends and canopies of beds; on the legs and stretchers of tables; and on all vertical surfaces of cupboards and chests of drawers. The superfluous nature of furniture decoration is particularly pronounced in forms that express rank or prestige. The thrones of kings and bishops, the seats of guild masters, beds of state, the writing desks of chief executives, and the like have all lent themselves to imagery and ornamentation; and as the functional aspect of the piece has declined, it has seemed that the amount of ornamentation has increased. Purely functional milk stools and typewriting tables are devoid of ornamentation. This division can be noted with varying clarity throughout the history of furniture.

At times the ornamentation itself has, in a sense, been functional. The decoration of the earliest examples of furniture from Mesopotamia and Egypt, for example, had a symbolic or magical function. The legs of Sumerian stools are shaped like those of an ox, which was the guardian animal of the city of Ur. Egyptian furniture shows a much wider development of furniture legs based on animal models. Three-footed stools ending in dogs’ paws, folding stools with legs in the shape of ducks’ heads, and bed legs in the form of lions’ feet are known from a thousand years of Egyptian furniture history. Tables with lions’ legs can be seen on Assyrian reliefs. Similar animal symbols are known from representations of Greek furniture. Sometimes the arms as well as the legs of Greek chairs had animal shapes—terminating, for example, in the head of a lion or a ram. It is thought likely that ceremonial seats and thrones featured animal motifs partly as a magical expression of the transference of power. This ancient tradition lived on in European furniture; for example, in thrones, where griffons, lions, and eagles played a prominent part in the decoration.

Even in the furniture of antiquity it is difficult to differentiate between the symbolic and the aesthetic in decorative features. It is clear, however, that the animal world has always been one of the primary sources of ornamental motifs in furniture. Animal legs and heads are found, for example, as terminal decorations in the French Rococo chair and imitations thereof. The animal leg played a prominent part in English furniture of the 18th century and later passed into American furniture. English cabinetmakers and chair makers devised a naturalistically carved lion’s foot and a characteristic claw-and-ball foot, a motif that may stem from Chinese forms of ornamentation (not, however, on furniture) such as the dragon’s claw holding a ball or a pearl. Richly carved English mahogany chairs sometimes also feature the heads of birds, lions, or dogs as terminal decorations on the arms. Although the majority of Chinese chairs and tables are supported by straight legs of rounded wood, Chinese thrones and seats for dignitaries have curved legs that, for some unknown reason, may be imitations of elephant trunks.

Next to the animal world—and of more recent origin—architecture is the most important source of decorative motifs in furniture. In the late Middle Ages, the perpendicular tracery of Gothic architecture was transferred through the craft of the wood-carver to the fronts of chests. Italian chests and walnut cupboards of the same period were modelled on the marble sarcophagi of Classical antiquity, which are entirely architectonic in form. During the Renaissance and Baroque periods the column was introduced as a strikingly decorative frontal feature in the form of table legs and on cupboards. The fronts of very big, heavy cupboards particularly lent themselves to architectonic composition corresponding to the portals and gables of houses. At about the same time, the ornamental wealth of the Renaissance broke through in rosettes, cupids, and fruits on panelling and frames.

During the Court Baroque period under Louis XIV in France, the royal official style left its mark not only on ornate pieces of furniture but also on panels, doors, mirror frames, and, indeed, even on the facades of palaces and châteaus and the layout of formal gardens. The coherence between interior and furniture was even more pronounced during the Rococo period and under Louis XVI, culminating temporarily in the furniture and rooms of the French Empire style.

The 19th century often seems to have offered nothing more than a breathless repetition of this coherence between the ornamental design of furniture and the architecture of the interior—both revivals of the styles of the past. A new style did not arise until the close of the century. French Art Nouveau furniture, with its gliding vegetable forms, must be seen in conjunction with the houses and rooms for which it was executed. The furniture of Antonio Gaudí, a Spanish architect and designer, for example, had a profound coherence with his own buildings; and the strangely expressive and stylized furniture of a Scottish architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, forms an integral part of his buildings and interiors in Glasgow.

The influence of architecture on furniture can also manifest itself in a lack of ornament. There is a relationship, for example, between functionalistic architecture as it was first manifested in the 1920s at the Bauhaus in Germany and steel furniture designed by the German architect Mies van der Rohe.

Chair

Of all furniture forms, the chair may be the most important. While most other forms (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is used here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative forms such as the bench and sofa, which may be regarded as extended or connected chairs and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly defined.

The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic object; it is also an indicator of social rank. At the old royal courts there were social distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. In the 20th century the director’s or manager’s chair became an indicator of superior dignity, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.

As a furniture form, the chair encompasses a wealth of variations. There are chairs designed to match for a person’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In olden days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs), and in the 20th century there were chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern living has developed special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms have been evolved to conform to changing human needs. Because of its close association with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when in use. Whereas it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and evaluated with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the various parts of a chair have been given names corresponding to the parts of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the basic function of the chair is to support the body, its value is judged primarily on how well it fulfills this practical role. In the construction of a chair, the designer is bound by certain static laws and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair maker has great freedom.

The history of the chair covers a period of several thousand years. There are civilizations that have created distinctive chair forms, expressive of the highest endeavour in the spheres of technique and aesthetics. Among such cultures, special mention must be made of ancient Egypt and Greece; China; Spain and the Netherlands in the 17th century; England in the 18th century; and France in the 18th century during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

China

The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be traced as far back as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (618–907 ce) an unbroken series of drawings and paintings has been preserved showing the interiors and exteriors of Chinese houses and their furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood that bear an astonishing resemblance to representations of older chairs.

As was the case in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is found both with and without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one form, however, the stiles are slightly curved above the arms so as to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). All three parts are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the design of the back splat exercised an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a limited extent reinforce corner joints (and are loose into the bargain) represent a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were reserved for the senior members of the family, for they were held in great esteem.

The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decorative elements are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been joined together with either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.