I have the impression that if there is such a thing as a chair fetishist, then I must be one. At all events, I’ve lost count of the number of chairs I went through before I found the ones that were truly dear to my heart. This pilgrimage, looking back, had two aspects. The more prosaic was one with which those who have read others of my reportages from the battle front of antiques purchasing will be familiar: my perennial condition of having limited amounts of money and desires in excess of my funds. The other aspect was the also oft-alluded to matter of developing and refining one’s taste and knowledge as time goes by. The first chairs I ever bought turned out to be too short to sit at a dining table - they were what are sometimes known as salon chairs. If you try to sit at table with them, you are more likely to be able to rest your chin on the table than your arms. Fools rush in…
I think I began with Victorian, maybe even Edwardian chairs. The first thing I had to learn was that chairs are for sitting in. He who sits down at table leans back. Ergo, the weak point of an old chair is always the joint where the seat meets the back. Buyers of old chairs cannot behave as if they were taking tea with the duchess. In the showroom, you grab the back, pin the chair down by placing a knee firmly on the seat, then you push hard on the back. If the back moves, so do you - out of there. Second, only a very short distance behind, comes upholstery. Here, the discrimination required is elementary, my dear reader. There are two types of upholstery - the one done by the dealer’s wife at evening class, and the professional one.
Don’t hurt the dealer’s feelings - you may want to buy something else from him later - but don’t sit on his wife’s handiwork either, because you won’t sit on it for long. Upholstery is an art; there are no short cuts, quality craftsmanship is expensive and you have to pay the price. This is one of the areas of antique buying where you had better bite your lip hard and avoid bargains - the cheap chair will let you down: more literally than you may care for.
Look, this is what it comes down to: there are some lovely chairs out there, at very reasonable prices. The Victorian repro of Jacobean-style: oak, with the barley-twist legs and stretchers, were a case in point. But, as bitter experience has taught me, unless you want to buy your chairs purely as objects of aesthetic contemplation, they must fulfill two requirements. You and your guests must be able to 1) sit down on them, 2) lean back.
As for the other aspect, the refinement of taste, what can I say?: as I have said, I started Edwardian, or thereabouts, and progressed backwards - regressed? There are a lot of Edwardian and Victorian chairs around. Some, such as some of the walnut or rosewood baloon-backs are lovely pieces of work. But, like most if not all furniture from this period, they seem unable not to succomb to at least a degree of fussy ornamentation thoughseveral of the ones on the site linked to here are very plain and clean-lined
http://www.antiquesatlas.com/antiques/Furniture/Balloon_Back_Chair.php
I guess what happened with me was that, as I lurched from one disaster to another, it gradually got into my thick head that the beautiful cheap robust chair did not exist. I certainly learnt very soon that I would not be buying sets of six identical ones, still less eight, ten or twelve with two carvers (the ones with arms, which go at each end of the table) - big sets are worth big money. I would settle for pairs, odd ones on their own, or just possibly fours. For a while, I collected some William IV ones in ones and twos - William came immediately before Victoria and the style was different and these were already less common. Then I realised that there was a chair more beautiful than the William IV design, the second oldest type which you can find with some frequency: Regency. (The oldest generally available is Georgian, which takes us back before 1800).
[The Regency period in the United Kingdom is the period between 1811 and 1820, when King George III was deemed unfit to rule and his son, later George IV, was instated to be his proxy as Prince Regent. The term is often expanded to apply to the years between 1795 and 1837, a time characterised by distinctive fashions, politics and culture. In this sense it can be considered to be a transitional period between "Georgian" and "Victorian". ] (Wikipedia)
Once I had begun to home in on regency chairs, they eclipsed everything which had come before - i.e. all the more recent styles referred to above. It soon became apparent, however, that there were regency chairs and regency chairs. The ones with straight turned front legs, for example, were scarcely more elegant that the William ones. Because these were chairs approaching 200 years old, there was an alarming proportion of ones that were falling to pieces, or had already done so and been put back together in various nasty ways, not to mention that no chair has ever been more reproduced, and the ‘regency’ chairs which you find all over the place are more likely than not a decade or two old. Finally, there is the matter of the table. Regency dining tables seem to be few and far between - I think I’ve only ever seen three or four in the flesh as it were- and they cost serious money. If you want to get a look at the nature of the beast, hit this, but don’t expect prices!
http://www.hares-antiques.com/sales/tables/dining/pedestal.aspx
I seem to have been rabbitting on again. To cut a long story short, I managed to buy four of the chairs illustrated at the closing down sale of an old dealer, connoisseur and lover of the genre, at a price which I shall never see again. I think they have the most beautiful line, the craftsmanship is wonderful, and they have ended my long and restless search for ‘the chair’. Later, I managed to pick up an additional pair, rather different, without the same beautiful line, but at a price I could handle, so I now have six to sit around my Georgian table - I never did find a regency dining table.
Here is one of the chairs:
The second image shows both the beautiful line of the back legs and the classic weak point where stress has split the wood along the grain - the only one of the eight back legs thus affected. For me, the quality of this chair is in both the simplicity of the outline, and the harmony of the proportions. I love to remind myself that when people first sat in these chairs, Napoleon was alive.
