Side chair

Side chair c. 1870 Gilt, ebonized and carved wood, modern green plush, 64 x 64 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This ebonized chair with gilt, incised decoration reflects the changes in furniture ornamentation and construction that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. Design reformers called for a reduction of heavily carved furniture. Exuberantly rendered naturalistic or architecturally derived decoration, typical of mid-century furniture, was deemed immoral, fallacious, and gaudy - it was also difficult to clean since it trapped dust and dirt. Shallow, incised ornamentation was considered more appropriate.

Most commercial furniture, decorated with glued, machine-carved elements, was objectionable to design reformers. In his effort to reform "bad taste" in furniture design and interior decoration, Charles Locke Eastlake condemned excessive decoration and unnecessary affectation, advocating ornamentation suitable to the object it adorns and insisting that the least amount of embellishment be employed. While this chair exhibits many of the qualities required by Eastlake, it also fulfils the conditions demanded by its designer, Christopher Dresser. Although Dresser had called Eastlake "the apostle of ugliness," occasionally, he agreed with him and considered Eastlake's popular book, Hints on Household Taste (1868), worth reading. Dresser also admonished heavy carving and declared in his Principles of Decorative Design (1873) that details and decorative enrichment must be subordinate to the work as a whole.

Dresser illustrated this chair in his 1873 publication as "in the manner of an Egyptian chair." He stressed the importance of construction, commenting that a chair soundly designed allows the user to sit confidently - unlike many contemporary examples, including Eastlake's. The stylized palmettes and foliage reflect Dresser's interest in Egyptian motifs as well as botanical forms.

The present chair was made by Chubb & Sons, a company in London producing artistic furniture and metalwork.