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 [...]

CHAIRS About 1815-1860
Above, an Austrian Biedermeier sofa, about 1820,
french Charles X mahogany ,armchair, about 1825.
Biedermeier (post-Empire) style in Austria, Germany, Scandinavia, 1815-35. Chairs – mostly without arms – have square-section legs, straight or slightly splayed, and low backs with top rails projecting at sides beyond uprights, enclosing lyre, vase, dolphin or triple reed motifs, or [...]

Art Nouveau Chairs 1890-1920
Declining quality of commercial products blamed - often unfairly - on machine work. Reformist movement partly inspired by folk culture, but culminates in 1890s with international style taking its name from main outlet, la Maison de I’Art Nouveau in Paris.
Art nouveau: Paris designers; de Feure, noted for rich upholstery on neo-Louis XVI [...]

Art Deco CHAIRS 1920-1940
Painted chair designed by Rietveld for a military club in 1932.
Modernist and Art Deco: About 1917, Dutch architect Rietveld, trained by father as a joiner, designs his first chair under- influence of Lloyd Wright, dispensing with traditional joints – type that becomes known as ‘Red and Blue’ (see CONSTRUCTION.) With other members [...]

CHAIRS About 1770-1815
Designers converging on Rome in 1750s absorb ideas of classical Roman decoration and begin to apply them in 1760s to seat furniture with square, rectangular or oval backs; straight legs in place of cabriole. Neo-classical style international by 1770, identified with reigns of Louis XVI in France, Friedrich Wilhelm 11 in Prussia, Joseph [...]

French and Italian Gothic and Renaissance Chairs Before 1630
Seats furniture ranging from simple stools to splendid thrones, some dating from about 1250 BC, have survived in Egyptian tombs. Greeks and Romans developed these types and added elegant couches. All these became prototypes for much later models, and will repay study, but the private collector is [...]

CHAIRS: COUNTRY WINDSOR
Late-18th century yew comb-back Windsor chair.
Made from the early-18thC onwards by wood turners or ‘bodgers’ setting up temporary workshops in woodland areas. Although made in many parts of the country - hence enormous regional differences in detail - High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire became, and has remained, the centre of the industry. Since the [...]

CHAIRS: VICTORIAN UPHOLSTERED
About  1840-1900
Typical mid-Victorian lady’s drawing-room chair.
Left, a late-Victorian gentleman’s chair with scrolled arms, rounded back, straight
A’squared-up’ version 0/ the 1880’s with  machineproduced carving.
Turned legs and arm supports (the latter sometimes as a row of spindles).
CHAIRS: CORNER
Mahogany, walnut, occasionally rosewood. Stained beech and birch on later cheaper versions and for underframes. Sometimes frame of [...]

COUNTRY: LADDER- AND SPINDLE-BACKS
About 1700-1939
Traditional ladder-back, spindle and other turned chairs were made in all parts of Britain throughout the 18th and 19thC. Although regional variations exist in the shape of turnings and so on, most follow the same basic patterns. Some arts and crafts designers were influenced by the tradition, and from the 1860s [...]

CHAIRS: VICTORIAN BALLOON-BACKS
1840-1885
The most familiar Victorian chair, made in various forms and for a variety of rooms, long after its rococo or ‘Old French’ style was generally unfashionable. The rounded seat and waisted back reflected contemporary
dress fashion.
The majority with slender cabriole legs flowing down from serpentine seat rails and ending in neat, slightly pointed French-type, [...]