| rdfs:comment
| - Carved armchair with cartouche-shaped back and serpentine-sided seat joined by open arms, on cabriole legs; modern painted decoration and modern upholstery with yellow silk top covers trimmed with wide braid. (en)
- 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)
- This whole entry is being amended. No longer applicable. (8/7/14)
<u>Design</u>
A large, carved and painted-but formerly gilded-armchair, with stuffed back, seat and arm pads. The frame is boldly carved all over with C-scrolls, rocailles, cabochons, flowers, foliage and other rococo ornament. The serpentine-sided, round-cornered back is raised on struts above the serpentine-fronted, slightly canted seat, which has scrolling aprons merging in profile with cabriole legs that end in scroll feet. The back and seat are linked by carved open arms, each arm support rising from a large C-scroll in the side rail and mirroring the form of the front legs. The frame is painted yellow with details picked out in green and the flowers in red, this scheme introduced in 1968. The chair is covered in yellow plain-weave silk, trimmed on the back and seat with a wide woven cotton(?) braid, dating from 1968-70.
The chair-back is carved on the front face with rocailles, acanthus scrolls and flowers, centring on a cartouche of decorated C- and S-scrolls at the top, and one of smaller scrolls with cabochons at the bottom, the supporting struts formed as bead-spined acanthus sprays. Similar rocailles are carved on the seat-frame, the front rail centring on an apron cartouche of further decorated C-scrolls, echoing the top rail. Each of the side rails is carved in the front two-thirds with two nearly abutting C-scrolls-the front scroll merging in outline with the front leg, the larger one behind merging with the arm-support. Above the scroll the arm support is carved with a flame-like motif and at front and back of each arm rest are pairs of leafy C-scrolls. Each of the front legs is carved at the knee with a rocaille-framed, heart-shaped cabochon; each of the back legs, with a C-scroll-framed shell; and all four legs have a ruffled moulding descending to the foot, which ends in a foliate scroll raised on a shallow plinth. The back seat rail, like the back third of each side rail, has moulded edges but almost no carving, except for a vivacious central rocaille scroll with acanthus-scroll lower border. The back-frame above this is entirely plain.
<u>Construction</u>
The chair appears to be made of beech throughout, and the front seat rail is pieced out in the apron. The four seat rails are tenoned and double-pegged to the front legs and the full-height back uprights. The four seat rails and both rails of the chair back are tenoned and double-pegged to the front legs and the full-height back uprights (except that the bottom rail of the chair-back appears not to be pegged). The arm-supports are tenoned and double-pegged to the seat rails, and perhaps pegged singly to the arm-rests. Each arm-rest is housed in the front face of the back upright at almost full section (slightly rebated at top and bottom but not at the sides), and tenoned in and pegged, singly, behind the housing. At the joints of the top rail, the through-pegs can be seen to be tapered, being larger in diameter at the front than the back; probably the same technique is used throughout. The front leg joints are now reinforced with blocks glued and nailed in the inside angles with the seat rails.
The present paint is applied over a single scheme of matt and burnished gilding, which has been revealed on the back right leg where some of the paint has been removed. This is executed in water gilding, or possibly a combination of oil and water gilding for the matt and burnished areas respectively.(1)
<u>Upholstery</u>
The upholstery is entirely modern, at least in the seat. This has a foundation of jute close-webbing (with three narrow stripes), which appears to date from the early twentieth century and, on top, a jute base cloth that, together with all the materials above it, probably dates from 1968 when the chair was re-covered (see below). The seat is stuffed primarily with vegetable fibre, secured with loosely woven jute and apparently constructed with a stitched edge on all four sides (with just one row of top stitching); on top of this is a thin layer of vegetable fibre and horsehair, secured with fine linen, and then a layer of cotton wadding beneath the yellow silk top cover.(2) The back of the chair is covered on the back face, immediately behind the foundation, in the same yellow silk as is the front and must, therefore, have been reupholstered at the same time. It appears to be skate stuffed, but all the internal materials are concealed.
There are numerous tack holes on the back uprights and arm-supports, at and just above the level of the seat, from which the original form of the upholstery can be tentatively reconstructed. The holes on the front face of the arm supports suggest that originally the dome of the seat was slightly higher at the front than now. On the back uprights there are holes on the completely plain flat face behind the seat, indicating that the seat cover was taken around these uprights. Only by doing this, or by fixing blocks to the front and inner squared faces of the legs, could the upholsterer have avoided exposing flat spandrel-shaped areas of wood, as now, at the top of these faces-an unresolved treatment that cannot have been adopted originally.
On the underside of the seat rails are clusters of tack-holes suggesting that at one time the seat has been sprung. There are also remnants of a thin linen bottoming cloth, fixed nearer to the outer edge than the cloth used to support the springs (and too light to take the strain of springing).
<u>Notes</u>
1. A cross-section of a burnished area taken in 2009 yielded thick gesso, red bole, water gilding, gesso or a gesso-like layer, and yellow paint. A cross-section of a matt area (on the side of the foot) yielded gesso, several layers of gilding intermixed possibly with an oil mordant (no bole), yellow paint, and varnish. Overtly this suggests that the matt areas are oil-gilt, but the intermixed areas could alternatively be a rather careless treatment of water gilding.
2. These layers can be seen where the top cover and linen stuffing-cover have been unpicked at the left end of the back seat rail. There is a conspicuous row of large stitches in the underside of the webbing, behind the front seat rail; how (or whether) this relates to the present upholstery construction is unclear. (en)
- This entry is being amended (08/07/2014)
The naturalistic, asymmetrical carving of this armchair, and the manner in which the structural elements flow into each other without separation, reflect the influence of the important French designer Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (1695-1750). Its virtuoso execution has been compared to the work of the joiner Nicolas Tilliard (1676-1752) and his better-known brother Jean-Baptiste Tilliard (1686-1766). But the chair bears no maker's mark, and it probably dates from before 1743 when Parisian furniture makers were first required to stamp their work. Other matching armchairs and stools survive, indicating that it must once have formed part of an imposing suite, probably in a Parisian salon. Yet nothing is known of this distinguished chair's history until shortly before the V&A acquired it in 1914.
The armchair was probably gilt originally, but it has been stripped and redecorated, leaving no trace of the original scheme. The present painted decoration and upholstery were introduced in 1968-70. (en)
|
| P3 has note
| - Carved armchair with cartouche-shaped back and serpentine-sided seat joined by open arms, on cabriole legs; modern painted decoration and modern upholstery with yellow silk top covers trimmed with wide braid. (en)
- 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)
- This whole entry is being amended. No longer applicable. (8/7/14)
<u>Design</u>
A large, carved and painted-but formerly gilded-armchair, with stuffed back, seat and arm pads. The frame is boldly carved all over with C-scrolls, rocailles, cabochons, flowers, foliage and other rococo ornament. The serpentine-sided, round-cornered back is raised on struts above the serpentine-fronted, slightly canted seat, which has scrolling aprons merging in profile with cabriole legs that end in scroll feet. The back and seat are linked by carved open arms, each arm support rising from a large C-scroll in the side rail and mirroring the form of the front legs. The frame is painted yellow with details picked out in green and the flowers in red, this scheme introduced in 1968. The chair is covered in yellow plain-weave silk, trimmed on the back and seat with a wide woven cotton(?) braid, dating from 1968-70.
The chair-back is carved on the front face with rocailles, acanthus scrolls and flowers, centring on a cartouche of decorated C- and S-scrolls at the top, and one of smaller scrolls with cabochons at the bottom, the supporting struts formed as bead-spined acanthus sprays. Similar rocailles are carved on the seat-frame, the front rail centring on an apron cartouche of further decorated C-scrolls, echoing the top rail. Each of the side rails is carved in the front two-thirds with two nearly abutting C-scrolls-the front scroll merging in outline with the front leg, the larger one behind merging with the arm-support. Above the scroll the arm support is carved with a flame-like motif and at front and back of each arm rest are pairs of leafy C-scrolls. Each of the front legs is carved at the knee with a rocaille-framed, heart-shaped cabochon; each of the back legs, with a C-scroll-framed shell; and all four legs have a ruffled moulding descending to the foot, which ends in a foliate scroll raised on a shallow plinth. The back seat rail, like the back third of each side rail, has moulded edges but almost no carving, except for a vivacious central rocaille scroll with acanthus-scroll lower border. The back-frame above this is entirely plain.
<u>Construction</u>
The chair appears to be made of beech throughout, and the front seat rail is pieced out in the apron. The four seat rails are tenoned and double-pegged to the front legs and the full-height back uprights. The four seat rails and both rails of the chair back are tenoned and double-pegged to the front legs and the full-height back uprights (except that the bottom rail of the chair-back appears not to be pegged). The arm-supports are tenoned and double-pegged to the seat rails, and perhaps pegged singly to the arm-rests. Each arm-rest is housed in the front face of the back upright at almost full section (slightly rebated at top and bottom but not at the sides), and tenoned in and pegged, singly, behind the housing. At the joints of the top rail, the through-pegs can be seen to be tapered, being larger in diameter at the front than the back; probably the same technique is used throughout. The front leg joints are now reinforced with blocks glued and nailed in the inside angles with the seat rails.
The present paint is applied over a single scheme of matt and burnished gilding, which has been revealed on the back right leg where some of the paint has been removed. This is executed in water gilding, or possibly a combination of oil and water gilding for the matt and burnished areas respectively.(1)
<u>Upholstery</u>
The upholstery is entirely modern, at least in the seat. This has a foundation of jute close-webbing (with three narrow stripes), which appears to date from the early twentieth century and, on top, a jute base cloth that, together with all the materials above it, probably dates from 1968 when the chair was re-covered (see below). The seat is stuffed primarily with vegetable fibre, secured with loosely woven jute and apparently constructed with a stitched edge on all four sides (with just one row of top stitching); on top of this is a thin layer of vegetable fibre and horsehair, secured with fine linen, and then a layer of cotton wadding beneath the yellow silk top cover.(2) The back of the chair is covered on the back face, immediately behind the foundation, in the same yellow silk as is the front and must, therefore, have been reupholstered at the same time. It appears to be skate stuffed, but all the internal materials are concealed.
There are numerous tack holes on the back uprights and arm-supports, at and just above the level of the seat, from which the original form of the upholstery can be tentatively reconstructed. The holes on the front face of the arm supports suggest that originally the dome of the seat was slightly higher at the front than now. On the back uprights there are holes on the completely plain flat face behind the seat, indicating that the seat cover was taken around these uprights. Only by doing this, or by fixing blocks to the front and inner squared faces of the legs, could the upholsterer have avoided exposing flat spandrel-shaped areas of wood, as now, at the top of these faces-an unresolved treatment that cannot have been adopted originally.
On the underside of the seat rails are clusters of tack-holes suggesting that at one time the seat has been sprung. There are also remnants of a thin linen bottoming cloth, fixed nearer to the outer edge than the cloth used to support the springs (and too light to take the strain of springing).
<u>Notes</u>
1. A cross-section of a burnished area taken in 2009 yielded thick gesso, red bole, water gilding, gesso or a gesso-like layer, and yellow paint. A cross-section of a matt area (on the side of the foot) yielded gesso, several layers of gilding intermixed possibly with an oil mordant (no bole), yellow paint, and varnish. Overtly this suggests that the matt areas are oil-gilt, but the intermixed areas could alternatively be a rather careless treatment of water gilding.
2. These layers can be seen where the top cover and linen stuffing-cover have been unpicked at the left end of the back seat rail. There is a conspicuous row of large stitches in the underside of the webbing, behind the front seat rail; how (or whether) this relates to the present upholstery construction is unclear. (en)
- This entry is being amended (08/07/2014)
The naturalistic, asymmetrical carving of this armchair, and the manner in which the structural elements flow into each other without separation, reflect the influence of the important French designer Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (1695-1750). Its virtuoso execution has been compared to the work of the joiner Nicolas Tilliard (1676-1752) and his better-known brother Jean-Baptiste Tilliard (1686-1766). But the chair bears no maker's mark, and it probably dates from before 1743 when Parisian furniture makers were first required to stamp their work. Other matching armchairs and stools survive, indicating that it must once have formed part of an imposing suite, probably in a Parisian salon. Yet nothing is known of this distinguished chair's history until shortly before the V&A acquired it in 1914.
The armchair was probably gilt originally, but it has been stripped and redecorated, leaving no trace of the original scheme. The present painted decoration and upholstery were introduced in 1968-70. (en)
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