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Description: | This elegantly shaped dining chair is, typically of the period, made of beech wood and is painted with a pigment to simulate the grain of a more expensive and exotic timber, before being varnished. The surface treatment has largely been stripped off but most probably imitated mahogany. The beech and cane seating gives the chair a lightness in weight that made furniture of this kind easier to move. The loose squab cushion that was placed on the caned seat allowed for easy changing of the covering. Either side of the seat are two horizontal slots, made to take tapes to secure this cushion, which would probably have been thinner than the present one. Such chairs were most often specified as caned with a French stuffed cushion' of square profile. There were a number of specialist makers of fashionable fancy' chairs of this japanned or grained type at this period. The incurved legs, now generally termed sabre' or scimitar' and at the time Grecian', are copied from those found on Greek Klismos chairs of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, which were known from ancient tombstones and vase paintings that were being excavated. The form was first published in Percier and Fontaine book of 1801. (Percier, Charles and Fontaine, Pierre Francois-Leonard, Recueil de Decorations Interieures comprenant tout ce qui a rapport a l'ameublement, 1801). As in this case, the shape was echoed in the back as well as the front legs. The distinctive S-curve profile of the chair back is found in designs by George Smith of 1808 and is used here to bring the cross-bar forward to support the sitter's back comfortably. This chair is a development of a type of dining chair that was termed rather loosely a Trafalgar' or Egyptian' chair after about 1808, characterised by its smooth sweeping profile and rounded knees' at the seat rail. These terms reflect the high level of popular acclaim for Nelson and his sea victories in the Napoleonic Wars at the time, which are further alluded to by decorative motifs such as the rope moulding on the top rail and back-posts, and the circular brass bosses, including the mount in the centre of the back, representing cannon balls or shot. Additions And Alterations: Squab late twentieth century | Source: | Vads | Identifier: | http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=9116... | Go to resource |
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