Antique Chairs

Sheraton Chairs

Sheraton followed close upon the heels of Heppelwhite. His construction was delicate but strong, his chair-backs being really firmer than those of Heppelwhite, as a rule. They are generally rectangular in shape, .with the top sometimes curved but usually straight, with a section in the middle often slightly higher than the rest. In the backs are often four to seven slender uprights and sometimes diagonal pieces, but never a splat. The inside uprights join a cross-piece at the bottom, but almost never join the seat. Most of Sheraton's lines were straight. His legs were slender and tapering, sometimes square and sometimes round. The reeded legs are. more often found on his sideboards than on his chairs. The arms of his armchairs start high on the back, helping to strengthen it. Sheraton made use of satinwood, tulip-wood, rosewood, apple-wood, and occasionally mahogany, and his marquetry was often very fine. Sheraton chairs are less common than those of Heppelwhite or Chippendale, and good ones are very highly prized.

The period of the Empire in France was from 1804 to 1814, but its influence lasted until 1830. Some of the French Empire chairs reached this country with other Empire furniture. They were chiefly mahogany, sometimes with gilt mounts and highly polished. Some of them were both graceful and comfortable, and well suited to modern drawing-rooms and music-rooms, but more often they were heavy, stiff, and extreme in style.

Sheraton lived long enough for his late style to be influenced by the Empire, but it was the American cabinet-makers of the early nineteenth century whose work shows the effects of Empire fashions most noticeably. The rolling back, continuous curves in sides and legs, lyre-shaped splats, and Napoleonic details in the carving are the principal Empire features found in these American chairs. Some of them are solid mahogany, some rosewood, and some painted, but a large proportion of them are of mahogany veneer, for the mahogany forests had been robbed of their finest trees and the wood was becoming rarer and more valuable. Up to about 1840 these were grandmother's best parlor chairs.

Another type of early nineteenth-century American chair is more or less nondescript, showing some of the Empire feeling, with a strong mixture of Dutch, while the pre-Chippendale solid splat again appears. These are often veneered with a light-brown mahogany, and were grandmother's dining-chairs.

These nineteenth-century chairs are interesting in many ways, but they can hardly be classed as antiques, and for use in modern houses there are few places where they seem to fit in. Certainly they are inferior to many of the earlier types in almost every respect.

This covers in a brief way the most important types of old chairs commonly found in this country, dating from i 600 to 1840. Some are better than others for modern furnishing, but their market value is not always governed by their usefulness. An idea of these values may be gained from the captions with the pictures illustrating this chapter. Any general statement regarding prices and values would be likely to be misleading. The Georgian chairs command the highest prices, while some of the best of the cottage chairs may be picked up for a song. A thousand dollars would be a reasonable price for a set of six genuine Chippendales, while you may be able to get a good slat-back of much earlier date for seventy-five cents at a country auction.

Because the Georgian chairs bring the highest prices, they offer the greatest temptation to the faker and the counterfeiter, and the shops are full of spurious Chippendales and Heppelwhites. So be wary when you buy. I shall treat the subject of faking more in detail in a later chapter. Get an expert to advise you, if possible. But when it comes to picking out the individual chair, choose for yourself, and get, above all things, a chair you can live with.