Free Now I Sit Me Down by Witold Rybczynski Page A

that favored what the painter William Hogarth termed the “Line of Beauty” in art, architecture, and decor. The proportions of chairs changed, the seats becoming more commodious and wider at the front. This not only provided more comfort and stability, it also created a greater visual balance. The cabriole legs, which broadened at the knee where they connected to the seat rail, no longer required stretchers, and thus stood free. Only the front legs were curved; the rear legs, rectangular and slightly splayed, were a secondary compositional element.
    Vincent Scully once observed that an occupied cabriole chair disappears behind the sitter, but an unoccupied chair can seem almost alive:
    The arms curve; the splat lifts and gestures behind them. The back, with a wonderfully controlled curve, comes down and, often with a profoundly articulated hip joint, transmits its energies into the seat, which in turn transmits them to the legs. They are cabriole legs, and therefore they bend, almost crouch, and they terminate in feet of one kind or another. Eventually many of them became ball-and-claw feet, clutching and full of power. The whole chair becomes a kind of animal.
    The side chair emerged first in the form of the klismos but, ignored by the Romans, it disappeared and was soon forgotten. The Middle Ages laboriously rediscovered the side chair, a crude device, not much better than the simple Cycladic chair of four thousand years earlier. The invention of upholstery improved things, but it was the influence of the ancient Chinese yokeback chair that was decisive. The cabriole chair brought together several separate strands: a comfortable padded seat, delicately carved wood, a supportive splat, and expressive double-curved legs. The last, in particular, produced something not seen before in a side chair—personality.

    Cabriole chair, eighteenth century

 
    FIVE
    A Golden Age
    A wing chair is a curious sort of chair. It is too vertical to be called a lounge chair, yet with its fully upholstered arms, back, and sides it is the perfect place to take a nap. We associate wing chairs with private clubs and cozy firesides, but they were originally intended for the bedroom. In fact, the first wing chairs, which appeared in England in the 1670s, were called “sleeping chayres.” A pair survives in Ham House, a grand mansion on the outskirts of London: ornate chairs with open arms, padded elbow rests, carved gilded frames, crimson brocade upholstery with gold fringe, and tall upholstered wings. Both the wings and the back are adjustable by means of iron ratchets.
    The Ham House chairs were specially made for a suite of rooms decorated to receive a state visit by Queen Catherine, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. Despite their richness, the chairs have an improvised look; the rectangular wings are awkwardly hinged to the back—like a pair of shutters. If these aren’t the first wing chairs they are certainly very early versions. We might credit the mistress of Ham House, Elizabeth Murray, Duchess of Lauderdale, with the idea, for this exceptional woman was an inveterate domestic inventor whose kitchen included an enclosed countertop cooking stove and who installed the first private bathing room in England for her own use (baths were usually taken in tin tubs brought into the bedroom by servants).
    The adjustable flaps and the reclining back of the Ham House chairs were cumbersome, but the idea of an armchair that protected the sitter from drafts proved popular. As the design was refined, the wings, arms, and back were smoothly integrated, and the entire body of the chair was padded and covered in fabric. The legs in early wing chairs were usually ornate. In the case of the Ham House chairs, the stretcher is a double scroll that includes cherubs holding bunches of grapes, and elaborately shaped legs rest on carved seahorses. Later wing chairs were simpler, and by the Georgian period, cabriole legs were