Object Details
Object Essay
As depicted in eighteenth-century portraits, roundabout, or corner, chairs were popular for both reading and writing. John Singleton Copley’s portrait of John Bours, for example, depicts the Newport subject in a contemplative pose seated in a similar chair while reading. A contemporary portrait of George Wyllis of Hartford attributed to Joseph Steward contains even more explicit references to the sitter’s writing and reading, including a roundabout chair. Eighteenth-century probate inventories confirm the frequent proximity of roundabout chairs to gentlemen’s desk and bookcases and suggest that they often belonged to larger matched sets of parlor seating furniture.1The Collection’s chair is published in Fitzgerald 1982, 63. See Prown 1966, 1: fig. 93 (for Bours); Jobe and Kaye, 362 (for Wyllis); and Cummings 1964, 253, 255–56. Other English names for this form include “smoking” and “barber’s” chairs, functions that were also specifically male.
In each instance, roundabout chairs permitted sitters to turn freely between a desk or table and another person in a room. The angular front corner of this Boston chair must have made swiveling less comfortable than the generously curved rails of contemporary Newport examples, which express more overtly the act of straddling.2Compare, for example, Ott, no. 20. The probability that the Collection’s chair was once part of a larger set of matching chairs suggests that consistency of design may have required the sacrifice of comfort. Also, like many roundabout chairs, this example originally served as a commode chair, as indicated by the frame for a chamber pot fastened to the rails below the loose seat frame.
The purchaser of roundabout chairs had a range of design options. Cabriole legs with claw-and-ball feet, for example, were more expensive than straight legs or common pad feet, but less expensive than carved knees like these. The fluted arm supports on the Department of State’s chair would have cost several shillings more than the plain vase-and-ring turnings found on other chairs, although simply turned supports often correspond more harmoniously to the turned stretchers of the base. Optional crossed stretchers had little to do with the chair’s stability, as opposed to the shaped crest that secured the joint between the arms and provided support for sitters inclined to slouch in the curved portion of the back between the splats. Finally, high-style chairs like this example, but without a commode seat, could be upholstered over the rails and embellished with ornamental brass-headed tacks.3For examples of chairs with these options, see Sack Collection, 4: 1013 and 7: 1743; and Bernard & S. Dean Levy New York, Catalogue 5 (spring 1986), 65.
Thomas S. Michie
Excerpted from Jonathan L. Fairbanks. Becoming a Nation: Americana from the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State. New York: Rizzoli, 2003.