Free Now I Sit Me Down by Witold Rybczynski

express this association in their designs. While the human leg, with its extended foot, would make a strange, Daliesque chair leg, an animal leg, with its compact paw or hoof, is more suitable. One of the oldest surviving chairs in existence, dating from the twenty-sixth century B.C. , belonged to the mother of the pharaoh Cheops, who built the great pyramid at Giza. The reconstructed armchair, now in the Cairo Museum, is made of gold-plated wood decorated with papyrus flowers. The four legs are animal-shaped and rest on delicate little cat’s paws, felines being revered cult figures. The legs of the chairs I saw in the Met’s Egyptian gallery had similar cat’s paws. The Greeks made heavy thrones with naturalistic animal legs ending in paws, hooves, or claws; sometimes the legs appear to belong to lions, sometimes to bulls. The legs of folding stools were likewise given animal shapes with visible fetlocks and hooves or paws. The Romans continued this practice, especially in table legs, whose exaggerated paws seem to belong to mythical monsters.
    The ancient Chinese similarly mimicked animal shapes in their furniture. There are surviving ritual bronze vessels supported on tiger feet, and couches and tables whose legs rest on horse hooves and dragon claws. The last are usually carved grasping a pearl, which neatly solves the practical problem of how sharp claws meet the floor. While the legs of these tables are usually straight, in some cases they have a double curve that mimics the shape of a quadruped’s rear leg. George Kates called this fetlock-inspired shape a “cabriole leg” because it resembled the double-curved European furniture leg. The English word cabriole is derived from the French cabriolet , a corruption of capriole, a particular leap in ballet. Armchairs en cabriolet were light enough to be picked up and moved. Such chairs generally had double-curved legs, which is the chief sense of the term in English. Since the Chinese examples date from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and the cabriole leg does not appear in Europe until the early eighteenth century, the resemblance is actually the other way around. The cabriole is yet another case of the Chinese getting there first.
    Chinese goods arrived in Europe during the sixteenth century. The most highly prized import was porcelain, whose delicacy astonished Europeans, but chairs and tables, beautifully crafted out of extremely hard tropical woods, were also popular. These pieces were often lacquered, a technique that was unknown in the West. European cabinetmakers copied this finish, which they mistakenly termed “japanning.”
    The influence of China resulted in the fashion for chinoiseries, objects that were vaguely influenced by Oriental motifs. But the Chinese influence could also be profound. Cabinetmakers adopted the double-curved leg (which the British called a “hock leg” or a cabriole leg) and used it in chairs, daybeds, sofas, tables, desks, and cabinets. In some cases, the animal shape was pronounced, with the foot carved to resemble claws or talons grasping a ball, in direct imitation of the claw-and-pearl foot. A dragon’s foot might even include scales. In other versions—more appealing to the modern eye—the pronounced upper knee shape and the foot-shaped swelling at the base of the leg are abstract forms. The other profound change in chair design, also copied from Chinese models, was the S-shaped splat. The splat, which replaced the traditional padded backrest, followed the natural shape of the spine and supported the lumbar region. Back splats became popular because they were comfortable, made the chair lighter, and provided the cabinetmaker an opportunity for showing off decorative carving.
    These changes to the chair should not be seen in isolation. The curved splat and the graceful cabriole leg, with its sinuous convex curve above and concave curve below, appealed to the Baroque sensibility