American Chairs About 1890-1940 - Art nouveau, Art Deco, Crafts Movement
Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the centre of the furniture industry, with Chicago as a breeding ground of reformist designers including Frank Lloyd Wright who stressed the need for good furniture that could be mass-produced with machinery and sold at reasonable prices.
In the 1890s there was a reaction against the historicism of the past half-century. American designers absorbed the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement (see p. 68) and added touches from art nouveau (see p. 196), to which style C. Rohlf’s elaborately carved chairs, around 1898, were, perhaps, nearest.
In 1894, D.W. Kendall designed for the Phoenix Furniture Co. an oak armchair with cane seat and flat arms that proved popular well into the 1920s. Simply-made chairs, sold off from a Spanish mission in California, inspired J.P. McHugh, who worked in oak and ash; E. Hubbard at the Ryecroft Community, East Aurora; Gustav Stickley at his Craftsman Workshops, Eastwood. Comfort was catered for with club easy chairs and deeply sprung ‘Davenport’ sofas.
Following World War 1, industrial design created the cantilevered, tubular steel chair, but a public preference for something glamorous was catered for with Art Moderne (see p. 275) which, at its best, combined traditional craftsmanship with modern streamlining. The low sofa and easy chair with deeply
Right rocking chair, New York, about 1890.
Oak reclining chair, designed by Frank Lloyd I right, about 1902.
sprung seats and backs, padded arms and minimal feet, took the term ‘fully upholstered’ to the point where woodwork was seldom visible. A sofa designed by the Spanish surrealist Dali, inspired by the lips of the American sex symbol, Mae West, is a classic example of the high Art Moderne style.
Crafts Movement: Native hardwoods such as oak, ash. Cane, rush for- Folk weaves for upholstery.
Industrial Design: Tubular metal, mainly steel. Serviceable upholstery fabrics.
Art Moderne: Exotic woods and expensive textiles.
Crafts Movement: Construction frankly exposed to view. Some makers, influenced by Wright, abandoned conventional joints in favour of screwing sections together.
Industrial Design: When steel tubes took the place of timber, traditional methods were supplanted by metalwork techniques such as welding, bending.
Art Moderne: Traditional joints - mortise-and-tenon, dovetail - though often cut by machine.
Crafts Movement: Exposed construction sometimes exploited as decoration, for instance butterfly joints and dowel ends stained by Rohlfs in contrasting colours. Carving was used by some craftsmen, but rejected by the puritanical.
Industrial Design: Puritanism of a slightly different kind saw decoration as superfluous, but often achieved - almost by accident - a decorative effect from elegant lines and fine proportions.
Art Moderne: Essentially a decorative style, exploiting every available means to achieve its ends - disastrously so at the lower end of the market.
Crafts Movement: Veneers little used. Coloured stains, green expecially, as well as the usual browns. Varnish on cheaper lines, wax on up-market products.
Industrial Design: Chromium plating on tubular steel. Cellulose sprays on 1930s woodwork.
Art Moderne: Veneered panels often used to face the fronts of arms on sofas and easy chairs upholstered in futuristic patterns popular in the jazz age.
Best buys: Mission chairs, especially Roycroft, Stickley - but go for good craftsmanship rather than labels. Many opportunities in Art Moderne seating that needs re-upholstery.
CRAFT MOVEMENT
Craft Movement chairs are often difficult to date because some designs, such as Kendall’s, remained in production for 30 years. Chairs by Stickley are often labelled and can still be bought at reasonable prices.

American Chairs About 1790-1810
Mahogany armchairs in Hepplewhite style, Massachusetts, about 1790-1810.
The publication of Robert Adam’s neo-classical designs was delayed by the War of Independence, but by 1790, those of Hepplewhite and Sheraton were available and being interpreted by chair makers, notably John Aitken of Philadelphia (where the Journeyman Cabinet and Chairmakers’ Book of Prices appeared in 1794-5); John Seymour of Boston; Samuel McIntire of Salem; Duncan Phyfe of New York (though the latter was more subject to French Directoire influence - see p. 19S). From 1795, Baltimore became a centre for furniture that included ‘fancy’ (painted) chairs.
The Federal style is identified with the first phase of neo-classicism.
Side-chairs: I Rectangular, oval or shield-shaped backs, the splats pierced and carved; legs straight and tapered, often terminating in spade’ feet. 2 Square-framed backs with a series of vertical bars replacing the splat; straight, tapered legs. 3 After 1805, square-framed backs enclosing straight or X-shaped bars. Phyfe also used X-shaped supports in place of conventional legs for chairs and settees.
`Fancy’ chairs: Legs socketed into the seat frame, painted panels in the backs.
Easy chairs: stuffed backs and seats, tapered legs; Martha Washington chair with high back, low seat and open arms a speciality of New Hampshire.
Frame settees: Chair-back types with oval or shield shapes conjoined, on tapered legs, open arms.
Fully upholstered settees (sofas):`Camel’ backs rising to a hump, scrolled arms.
Country chairs and settees: Windsor types in greater variety and more elegant than English. Some turnings simulate bamboo.
Slat-backs include the early rocker, said to have been invented by Benjamin Franklin around 1770, but becoming general during Federal period and developing into a national institution. The Shaker communities produced two main types - the light-weight ‘Sister’s’ rocker, and the heavier ‘Brother’s’ version with mushroom tops to the arm-supports.
West Indian mahogany the principal wood, but a wide mixture of native timbers used for seat furniture meant to be painted, for instance a set of 24 oval-backed maple chairs made in Philadelphia 1796 for Elias Derby of Salem.
Chairmakers had to perfect existing methods to meet the exacting demands of the neoclassical style with its emphasis on slim proportions and purity of line. Mortise-and-tenon joints had to be cut skilfully to create the fragile oval, heart and shield shapes of the backs.
The fragility of Federal chairs has necessitated legitimate repairs to many, but this has often led to abuse. An incomplete set is knocked apart and reassembled with a number of new parts copied from the originals. Thus, three chairs magically become six - each of them 50 per cent genuine; the new parts, if detected, are explained away as replacements. Look for differences in colour, texture, craftsmanship and finish.
Shield-back chair, taken apart for repair or cannibalization.
Delicate carving of neo-classical motifs: urns, swags, paterae, formally arranged flowers. Some craftsmen practised what amount to signatures; for example, Samuel McIntire of Salem carved a trailing vine down legs of shield-back chairs. Sparing use of satinwood inlay.
Mahogany was varnished to fill the grain, sanded and waxed until the early 1800s, when French polishing was introduced. ‘Fancy’ chairs were painted in polychrome, either with conventional neo-classical motifs or, in the case of the panel-back types produced in Baltimore and New York, with romantic landscapes. Windsor chairs were often painted black or green.
Heavy demand for sets of dining-chairs keeps prices high; collect odd ones of similar design to make a harlequin set  more fun and much cheaper.
American Chairs About 1810-1840
Federal mahogany dining hair, about 1815.
Following the War of 1812, American furniture was more influenced by the French Empire style than by English Regency.
The American Empire style (see p. 275) introduced the second phase of neo-classicism an academic approach to Ancient Greek and Roman shapes as well as ornament.
Side-chairs: Greek klismos type with sabre legs, favoured in Philadelphia; less so in New York, with the exception of a few makers, in particular the highly successful Duncan Phyfe (who had changed his name from the more prosaic Fife).
`Roman’ versions with turned front legs, more popular in New York. James Madison, President at the time of the War of 1812, ordered a set designed by the architect Benjamin Latrobe for the White House.
Left, painted ‘fancy’ chair, Connecticut, about 1820-1850. Right, early-19thC rocking chair.
Hitchcock chairs: Vernacular versions of late Sheraton on turned, slightly splayed front legs with wide seats, caned or rushed  factory-produced from 1820 by Lambert Hitchcock at Barkhamsted (now Rivington), Con.
Boston rockers from 1835: Purpose-built with rolled seats and arms to correspond with the action, as distinct from slat-backs mounted on rockers.
Couches (chaises longues), ‘lounges’: Updated versions of the day-bed, based on the Greek couch, with scrolled head, asymmetrical back and either sabre or turned feet; more popular around 1820 than the settee or sofa.
Carved mahogany settle, New York, about 1800-1810.
Upholstered settees (sofas): Similar in line to the couch but with symmetrical back and scrolled arms.
Window seats: Stools with arms but no back, on high legs or scrolled ‘dolphin’ supports, fashionable from 1825.
Mahogany, maple and exotic woods for visible parts of sophisticated seat furniture; beech for upholstered seat frames; ash, beech, birch, oak, hickory, juniper, pine, elm for Windsor and other ‘country’ types. A developing textile industry made home-produced, luxurious upholstery fabrics more widely available.
During the Colonial period, apart from some not very successful attempts at sill< production, mainly in Georgia, the weaving of expensive fabrics had not been encouraged, the colonies being regarded by Britain as a profitable market for manufactured goods. Few antique chairs, couches and sofas retain their original coverings anyway, but at the time, duty-free fabrics put good upholstery within the reach of a large public, and the quantity of seat furniture now surviving is that much greater.
Sound, traditional craftsmanship until 1830, growing reliance on machinery thereafter, leading to decline in craftsmanship. Backs of side-chairs were constructed in three different ways:
Top rails: top left, turned bar between uprights top right, flat rail tenoned between uprights: above, flat top rail (tablet) set against uprights and dowelled.
Turned or hand-carved rounded bar as top rail, set between uprights, and socketed into them. 2 A flat top rail, plain carved or inlaid, set between uprights and tenoned into them. 3 Flat top rail (’tablet’) set against the uprights and dowelled into them. Although nearest to Greek original type, this is the most prone to damage.
Chairs: Pierced and fretted lyre backs; brass inlay. Mainly stringing (thin strips to accentuate the line), but also complex patterns in top rails.
Sofas: Carving of cornucopias as faces to arms, bold scrolls as supports.
Increased use of veneers on seat rails of chairs. Hardwoods French-polished. Carved details picked out in gilt. Painted decoration of neo-classical motifs, flowers, fruit and landscapes on chairs of Hitchcock type.
Sabre-legs usually dearer than turned. Armchairs good as desk chairs and as extra seating  elegant but comfortable. Never buy a chair (as many do) without sitting in it and checking for comfort, unless your interest in it is only as an object to look at.
American Chairs About 1840-1890
Settee from a suite of Renaissance revival furniture, about 1870.
With the development of railways, the established centres of production in the East lost ground to Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cincinatti, Ohio. From 1840, trade catalogues began to appear. A.J. Downing’s The Architecture of Country Houses (I st. ed. 1850) and Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste (originally English but published in Boston, 1872) were also influential.
Not one style but many, seemingly in conflict yet melding to produce an American flavour from ingredients similar to quasi-historic revivals current in Europe: Classical (’pillar and scroll’); ‘Modern French’) (rococo curves, followed by Second Empire opulence); baroque (called ‘Elizabethan’ but heavily reliant on twist legs); Renaissance (prominent at Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, 1876, with emphasis on machine-worked, trumpet-shaped turnings); Gothic (pointed arches in chair backs, cluster column legs) vied with a Japanese craze in 1870 (bamboo, real or simulated, asymmetrical frets). From this medley, it was the ‘Modern French’ styles that most affected seat furniture.
Exotic hardwoods such as rosewood, imported in growing quantities. Steam-bent, moulded laminates patented by J.H.Belter, active in New York from 1844. Cast iron used for garden and office chairs, from 1850. Moulded papier miche chairs and settees produced at Litchfield, Connecticut from 1850. Printed chintzes and cretonnes fashionable for deep-buttoned upholstery. Natural branches and roots utilized for rustic seats. Grotesque chairs assembled from buffalo horns and stag antlers.
Side-chairs: Rococo; balloon backs, open or padded. French form of cabriole legs, i.e. the under-side of leg joins seat frame with concave curve, as opposed to convex curve of 18thC English and American type. 2 ‘Louis XVI’  in reality Napoleon 111; oval back, open or padded; turned, tapered legs.
Sofa: chaise longue; love seat (sofa for two); tete-a-tete (two seats facing in opposite directions); sociable (three or four seats facing in varied directions); all heavily upholstered, usually deep-buttoned to hold padding in place over spiral springs laced to webbed platform. Many with show-wood (exposed) frames; cabriole or turned legs on castors.
Rococo rosewood settee, New York, about 1855.
‘French’ form of cabriole leg, concave curve at knee; left, American 18thC cabriole leg, convex curve.
Carved scrolls and flowers in exaggerated version of Louis XV style. Belter’s moulded, laminated wood frames elaborately pierced and hand-carved, with high crests to chairs and sofas  a style imitated in cast iron. The lavish American version of plush Second Empire (Napoleon 111) style out-frenchified the French, the turned and fluted legs hidden behind a curtain of fringe.
Woodwork varnished, French polished or ebonised with details in gilt. Travesties of Eastlake’s simple designs, purporting to be Gothic, incised with geometric patterns and ebonised. Black japanned papier mch painted with flowers and scenes in brilliant colours.
Modern French style decorative, decadent, and, some think, delightful; can be bought cheaply in tatty condition. Cast-iron garden seats worth investigating.
The cult of collecting ‘Early American’ furniture was already established by around 1880, but the supply, even then, was inadequate. In 1884, the Journal of Cabinet Making and Upholstery reported that the making of antiques has become a modern industry. These copies have now had over 100 years to mellow. The quality of many is high but the proportions, when compared with authenticated specimens, are often wrong and the decoration is overdone.

AMERICAN CHAIRS About 1620-1690
Stools: Maple, oak, pine.
Wainscot chairs: Oak frames, pine panels in backs and seats.
Stick chairs: Maple, ash, oak frames; rush seats.
Peg-leg: Legs are turned or, more often, roughly rounded with a draw-knife, and driven through holes bored in the seat, so that their upper ends project very slightly above the surface; the fixing is tightened by driving a small wedge from above into the end grain of the leg.
An oak ‘Carver’ chair, about 1650.
Most of the seat furniture surviving from this period dates from after 1650 and chiefly comprises stools, chairs and armchairs.
Stools: I Fairly crude variations of the milking stool or ‘peg-leg’ type. 2 Joyned’ or joint-stools, also called coffin stools because a pair was often pressed into service to form a bier.
Chairs: I Rare, early ‘wainscot’ types with panelled backs and seats have turned legs, but were made by joiners. 2′Stick’chairs made entirely by turners. The Brewster armchair has spindles under seat, the Carver does not. 3 ‘Slat-backs’, also stick type, have shaped slats set between the uprights of the backs, and turned legs.
Long benches of this type were much less common in America than in England and Holland, and should be accepted as of American origin only if the evidence is very strong indeed.
Peg-leg stool with wedge.
Joined stools and chairs: Seat rails and stretchers have tenons cut at their ends which slot into mortises in the square sections, top and bottom, of the turned legs; the joint is secured with pegs driven through holes to penetrate the tenons (not to be confused with peg-leg construction, see above). The seat is similarly pegged to the seat rail.
Turned leg, mortised to receive tenons.
Stick: Stretchers, turned or rounded by hand, are driven into holes bored in the legs. Shaped slats, thin enough to be bent to curve outwards, are set in mortises cut in uprights of the back. In early armchairs, the arms are turned bars that slot into holes in the uprights and the arm supports. No pegging needed.
Wainscot chairs: Carved top rails occur only rarely, e.g. one at the Winterthur.
Stick chairs: Varied turnings include mushroom’ finials to arm supports. Slats shaped to several different patterns.
Oiled and waxed, varnished or painted.
Joined stools and wainscot chairs now too expensive to sit on. Peg-leg stools difficult to date, but good for a gamble. Stick and slat-back chairs can still turn up unexpectedly at bargain prices.
American Chairs   About 1690-1725
Black-painted William Mary banister-back armchair, about 1710.
American interpretations of the European and English (Charles II and William and Mary) baroque style are expressed in several new types of seating.
Slat-back chairs (see p. 293) continued to be made in great variety. New types included: square-backed Cromwell chairs with turned front legs, the seats and back upholstered, before 1700; a small number of high-backed chairs in the Charles II (Anglo-Flemish) style, with caned backs and seats, turned or scrolled legs, the armchairs with ‘ram’s horn’ arms, before 1700. Corner chairs with turned members and bowed backs, also in small quantities, from 1700. Banister-back chairs, from 1700 (see DECORATION). The day-bed  a couch for lounging on  before 1700 (see CONSTRUCTION). The New York waggon seat from 1720 (also made in other regions, such as Connecticut, Massachusetts); a crude prototype of the chair-back settee that served as seating in the house and, when lashed to a wagon, converted it into a makeshift carriage.
WAGGON SEATS
The waggon seat continued to be made well into the 19thC. Many offered for sale, though not fakes, are not as old as they are sometimes claimed to be. The hard use to which they were put means that early examples are seldom in pristine condition.
Replacement stool seats
Many experts (though not all) reject stools where the seat is secured by pegs driven in at the corners so that they penetrate the end grain of the legs, threatening to split them; such positioning, it is argued, occurs only when the original seat has been replaced clumsily.
Pegs on joint stool. The peg on the right is correctly placed.
Frames: Oak, walnut, beech, ash, maple. Slats: Hickory or ash (easily bent to shape when still green).
Turned spindles: juniper.
Upholstery (for Cromwell’ chairs): Leather or ‘Turkey work’  a hand-knotted imitation of Turkish carpets.
Caning (for baroque chairs and day-beds): Split and woven rattan cane.
A large Turkey work Carpet for the table and two doz. arm’d Cain Chairs are mentioned in the journals of the Burgesses of Virginia, 1702-12, in reference to the furnishing of the Council Chamber of the Capitol (first building) at Williamsburg.
High-backed baroque chairs: Front legs, whether turned or scrolled, often socketed into a flat seat-frame, instead of being jointed with mortise-and-tenon; likewise, the cresting rail of the back may be set on to uprights, instead of between them.
The day-bed: Essentially a chair with elongated seat and additional legs; the back, or bed-head, often hinged and fitted with a ratchet for adjustment.
Baroque chairs: Members turned, cresting rails arched and carved, ‘Spanish’ (also known as ‘Braganza’) feet shaped and carved.
Cromwell chairs: Varied turnings; ‘barley twists’ (spirals) were known as Crosswicks after the district near
Philadelphia where this speciality was practised.
Spiral twist leg.
Banister chairs: The back composed of split banisters (also known as balusters), produced by sawing the wood in half, lengthwise, lightly glueing the two halves together, turning on the lathe to the desired shape, then splitting them apart again. They are then set into the upper and lower rails of the chair-back with their flat sides facing inwards, so that no protuberances make for discomfort.
Split banisters: right, length of timber sawn in half, far right, halves reassembled for turning on lathe.
Right, rounded face; far right, flat face.
Baroque types often stained black and varnished, or japanned in imitation of oriental lacquer. Rural types oiled and waxed or painted.
Cromwell, high-backed and corner chairs, also day-beds, rare and highly priced. Best buy: individual slat-backs.
William & Mary maple day-bed, about 1725.
front leg socketed into seat frame.
Growing wealth created a demand for comfort, even luxury. Between 1725 and 1760, Boston alone gave employment to 38 chair-makers and 23 upholsterers. Regional differences became more marked in the work of Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Newport - the chief centres; for instance, New England side-chairs were taller and thinner than those of New York,
Attributions in this period are made by comparing examples with makers’ labels, for example William Savery of
Philadelphia: but names are sometimes bandied about for no better reason than to boost the price.
American Chairs  1725-1790
Left, Queen Anne walnut side-chair New York, Queen Anne walnut.
The Queen Anne style - merging, from 1760 into Chippendale - emphasised the S-shaped curve of the cabriole leg, a rounded seat and a swan-neck back with shaped centre splat (’fiddle back’) - a feature seen in many country-made chairs still retaining turned legs. In more sophisticated examples, the splats are ergonomically designed to suit the human spine.
Right, Chippendale mahogany side-chair, Philadelphia, about 1765-1770.
In the Chippendale period, the splat was fretted and pierced, and the cabriole leg slowly gave way to the Marlboro’ - straight, square in section but chamfered on the inside angle. Easy chairs have draught-excluding wings; a child’s version in solid timber has a hole in the seat to hold a pot.
In the 1780s, Daniel Trotter of Philadelphia was probably the maker of ladder-back chairs - sophisticated versions in mahogany of the country slat-back, with shaped and pierced slats and Marlboro’ legs. Country chairs of Windsor type, made with spindles of green timber socketed into bent frames, succeeded earlier stick types. Windsor settees were an alternative to the settle, high or low in the back, boarded or panelled.
Sophisticated settees; two main types:
Above, Chippendale soft, Philadelphia, 1775. The ‘chair-back’ or ‘frame’, conceived as two or three chair-backs conjoined.
Day-beds continued to be popular in the Queen Anne period, with fashionable splatbacks and cabriole legs.
Native maple and cherrywood substituted for walnut, the most fashionable wood 1725-50, and for mahogany, 1750-90. Upholstery materials ranged from leather and local worsted cloth to imported damasks, velvets and brocades. Stools, promoted to the parlour, had seats that, whether- or drop-in, were often covered in needlework made by the lady of the house.
Craftsmen did not at first trust the strength of cabriole legs with no underframing, and until 1740, many  in New England especially  continued to be united with turned stretchers.
As a means of joining the cabriole leg to the front of a curved seat, the mortise-and-tenon joint could be made to work only at the risk of weakening it, as too much of it had to be cut away to achieve the shape. Some makers compensated for this weakness by fitting a block inside. Others used a halving joint (a half-thickness of the side rail overlapping and glued to a half-thickness of the front rail). A cavity was then cut in the joint to receive the square at the top of the leg, shaped to a dovetail or tenon.
After 1760, the balloon shape of the seat was discarded in favour of an angular one, and in mahogany chairs of the Chippendale period, a conventional mortise-and-tenon joint is usual.
In Philadelphia in the mid-18thC, the regular method of joining the side-rails to the rear uprights was by means of a through-tenon, secured with pegs driven through holes in the side-rail. If the ends of the pegs and the through-tenon are visible, this is a sign of Philadelphian origin.
Queen Anne: Shells carved on knees of cabriole legs and often at the centre of the cresting rail which, in many New York examples, is pierced with two spaces flanking the shell. Feet were plain pads, carved lion paws or claw-and-ball. The Queen Anne style survived in Newport to the end of the Colonial period.
Chippendale: Splats fretted and pierced. Marlboro’ legs headed by Chinese fretted brackets, but cabriole legs with claw-and-ball feet persisted; in New York, they were carved with foliage down to the feet.
Queen Anne: Walnut veneers often used in splats and seat rails. Others with japanned decoration, usually in gold on a black ground.
Chippendale: Mahogany seldom used in veneer form on chairs. Walnut and mahogany surfaces rubbed down with sand or brick-dust, varnished, rubbed down again and wax-polished.
cabriole-legged types tend to fetch more money than Marlboro’, but much depends on detail. Windsor chairs made in great quantity and variety, but not cheap.
CORRECT CLAWS
In a well-carved claw-and-ball foot, the claw should appear to be grasping the ball with the strength of an eagle clutching its prey  a feature naturalistically rendered in Philadelphia, where the ball is flatter than in the rather square New York version. Newport claws have been unflatteringly described as limp. The differences are sufficiently marked to be acceptable criteria when making attributions.
Claw) and ball tool from a Chippendale side:-chair, about 1765-70.
CABRIOLE LEGS
Wing chairs with cabriole legs tend to command higher prices than ones with straight legs. Many of the latter type (A) have been glamorized by sawing off the legs and replacing them with cabriole legs (B), using dowels and/or hefty screws. The head of a screw may be visible but is more likely to have been countersunk and camouflaged with stopping wax. Dowels are out of sight, but if a flap of the upholstery is carefully lifted (C), it is possible to prove whether the cabriole leg and the square above it are of one continuous piece of wood, as they should be. If they are not, a human hair, pulled from your head and held taut, will penetrate the join (marked with arrows) that should not be there.
Wing chair with substituted cabriole legs.