| P3 has note
| - The <i>fauteuil</i>, or upholstered armchair, was a type of chair that became increasingly common in French bourgeois interiors from the seventeenth-century onwards. By the eighteenth-century, fauteuils were very prominent household furnishings; the 1746 inventory of Mlle Desmares listing 28 fauteuils, of various sizes, in rooms throughout her Saint-Germain-en-Laye house. (1)
Large armchairs of this type, with a flat back, were known as <i>fauteuils à la Reine</i>. Characterised by their elaborately carved frames and lavishly upholstered seats, <i>fauteuils à la Reine</i> first appeared in French interiors in the mid-eighteenth century. There they formed part of a room's fixed furniture, designed to be positioned against the wall as <i>sièges meublants</i>.
<i>Sièges meublants</i>, which included large armchairs, sofas and canapés, were used in conjunction with <i>sièges courants</i>. While <i>sièges meublants</i> were designed to stay in one place as a central part of the overall decorative scheme of a room, <i>sièges courants</i> were moved around an interior and grouped in different parts of the room as needed.
The carving and upholstery of <i>fauteuils</i> such as this one would have been planned as part of the larger decorative scheme of the room. The original upholstery would have related to the room's curtains and paint colour, and the carving on the chair back would have reflected and extended the design of the <i>boiseries</i>.
The architect J.F. Blondel reinforces the importance of the <i>sièges meublants</i> to the unity of a room's design when he writes: '[…] it is virtually impossible to transfer it [seat furniture] from one room to another, and in present-day France, when a newly-built mansion in sold, the purchaser must needs buy the furniture and get rid of his own.' (2)
<u>Notes</u>
1. Henry Havard, <i>Dictionnaire de l’Ameublement et de la Décoration Depuis le XIIIe Siècle Jusqu’à nos Jours. Tome II.</i> Paris: Maison Quantin, n.d., p. 131.
2. Quoted in Pierre Verlet, <i>French Furniture and Interior Decoration of the Eighteenth Century.</i> London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1967, p. 134. (en)
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