Altogether, often more than half of a family’s wealth was invested in its beds, bedding and clothing. For this reason, beds were given pride of place in the main room, where visitors were able to see them. The grandest beds in the richest households were state beds, perhaps slept in once in a generation by a royal personage on progress, or never slept in at all, simply functioning as a symbol of the family’s status, expressed in both materials and craftsmanship: carved wood posts, bed-curtains hanging on three sides, their elaborately embroidered rare fabrics then topped by layers of valances in yet more rich fabrics, all possibly further embellished with braid and fringe.
Until the seventeenth century in both the Netherlands and England, a curtain was sometimes a fabric hanging placed in front of a door, or a fireplace, to protect the room’s inhabitants from draughts. But most often a curtain meant a bed-curtain, which surrounded four-posters in much of England, or the open side of cupboard-beds in the Netherlands. And then suddenly a great change arrived. In the seventeenth century, the increasing supply of textiles, both manufactured at home and imported via the new eastern trade routes, and their decreasing cost, created new possibilities for household decoration, and the Low Countries participated enthusiastically, demonstrating a hearty appetite for display. Fabrics were among the most expensive decorative household objects, and by placing them in the windows, home-owners were signalling their wealth publicly.
In 1653, Wolfgang Heimbach, a German painter trained in the Netherlands and working at the royal court in Copenhagen, painted what is believed to be the earliest known representation of a pair of curtains, divided to frame a window (see plate section, no. 12). Although, as we have seen, verisimilitude in paintings, no matter how apparently naturalistic, is not a given, it is possible that this painting does depict something the artist saw, including as it does a small rod for pulling the curtains closed without risk of damage to the fabric. This touch of practicality suggests that the room may really have been furnished in this way. It is known, too, that several aristocratic households also participated in the new fashion at the same date. Ham House was using symmetrical curtains in some of its windows at roughly the same time, and by 1679 they were also seen in Dublin Castle.
In the following century, curtains became fully fledged status displays, some lavish beyond imagining. France led the way in this, as in so much to do with interior decoration for the upper classes. In 1755, the windows in the apartments of Mme de Pompadour, mistress to Louis XV, were framed with ‘a blind in Italian taffeta painted with translucent bouquets and garlands … the cord in silk and gold, with a pear-shaped tassel ornamented with spinach seeds, jasmine flowers, and sequins’. Many more who were not quasi-royalty, or even aristocrats, but were just rich, now elaborated their original desire to have their windows covered for privacy into a profusion of layers of different fabrics: first blinds; then, to cover their roller mechanisms, valances; then draping to cover the curtain rods; and, later, sheer fabrics over the glass, while heavy fabrics framed them on each side. It took far longer for even simple paired curtains to reach the affluent middle classes, and longer still until the additional drapery and swags did. A watercolour by a Danish customs-house inspector, Friderich Lütken, of his study in Elsinore in 1765, shows single curtains at all three windows; only in a drawing of the same room approximately fifteen years later do paired curtains appear.
Many items of household furnishings followed a similar route, beginning as a functional object before becoming a costly item of display. In Romeo and Juliet, written in the 1590s, the Capulets’ servants are ordered to ‘give room’, or make space, for the dancing by removing the furniture after the meal: ‘Away with the join-stools, remove the court-cubbert’ (a movable sideboard used to display plate) and ‘turn the tables up’, which was done by lifting the tabletop off its trestle legs, and turning it on its side to store it.* It was only from the end of the seventeenth century, as some of the great houses began to allocate a separate room for eating in, that heavy tables that were not routinely moved came into use. Even the rich, who had the income but not necessarily the space, were slow to adopt these pieces; lower down the social scale they were unknown. One-room living – or even two- or three-room living – was not conducive to heavy, single-purpose furniture. Instead small, light tables continued to be moved around the room to serve different purposes: the family ate on a table near the fireplace before pushing it against a wall so they could sit near the fire between meals, or sleep in front of it at night.
Householders moved their table around, that is, if they had one, and sat at it if they had anything to sit on. Most people did not. In the Middle Ages chairs were found in courts, and in the homes of the very great, but rarely anywhere else. Their purpose was to convey status and power, and rank was indicated by types of seating: those who sat in the one or two chairs available were clearly privileged. In Louis XIV’s reign, the highest-ranking at court sat in chairs with arms, the next level down in chairs without arms, below them, people sat on stools with backs, below them again, on backless stools, and finally there were folding stools. Yet even the stools did not demarcate the lowest level of court society: many at Versailles were not entitled to sit at all, but remained standing at all times in the presence of their betters.
Below this level in the seventeenth century, chairs were found only intermittently in daily life, and were by no means routine items of household furniture, whether in Europe or the colonies. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1633, a household valued at £100 – very wealthy – possessed two chairs. Half the houses in Connecticut before 1670 had no tables, and while 80 per cent had chairs, each household averaged fewer than three, less than half as many as there were residents. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, a third of houses in one county of Delaware still had no tables, and the same number had no chairs. Some adult family members sat on benches or chests at meals, their food resting on their laps, while children rarely had chairs, and were usually expected to stand while they ate. In the Netherlands, Jan Steen’s 1665 A Peasant Family at Meal-time shows only the man of the household with a seat at the trestle table (see plate section, no. 20). If there was enough seating for the adults, children might be allowed to use a chest while they ate off their laps, or, if there was a more than usual amount of furniture, they might sit on chests with their trenchers on stools beside them.
Well through the seventeenth century, chests, or trunks, or boxes, were the primary objects of use, as storage of course, but also as seating, as a flat surface to eat from and, later in the day, as a base for bedding. As the most multi-functional pieces of furniture, they were therefore the most useful. But as is so often the case with multifunctional items, chests, in doing everything, were never ideal for any of the single purposes they served. Even as storage spaces, their primary function, they have drawbacks. If a chest is carefully packed, things can be kept in separate layers within its single space. Even so, each layer has to be lifted out in order to reach items in the layer beneath. There is also no way of keeping disparate items apart, and indeed it appears that not only was there, initially, no separation of different types of stored items, but apparently there was no thought that this might be practical. In Bologna in 1630, a theft of linen and cheese from the same trunk was recorded without surprise.
While most houses continued to rely on the centuries-old storage–seating combination, a quiet storage revolution was brewing, with the Low Countries once again leading the way. The design of the chest, so simple, began to be modified. Each alteration, at each stage, must have seemed negligible. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, short legs were affixed to deeper chests, so that their users no longer had to bend over headfirst in order to reach the bottom. But even this small increase in their height prevented the chest from being used as seating, so at first these leggy chests were found only in rich households, which could afford both chests and stools or benches.
What might have been a drawback, that chests were now
confined to a single use, in fact permitted further modifications. That they opened from above had been a constraint on innovation: their height had to be limited, or access to the contents became impossible. In the sixteenth century, however, the hinges were moved from the top to the front panel. Now the legs could raise the chest to any height below eye-level, and the new side-opening had the added benefit that the entire contents could be seen at a glance: no longer did each layer have to be lifted out to reveal the one below. Shelves, which previously had only been affixed to walls, were adapted for use inside the new side-opening chests, to create a more definitive separation of, and support for, the stored items. With that, the chest ceased to be a chest. It had evolved into a cupboard.
As with beds, tables and chairs, cupboards began as luxury items for the wealthy. A chest might already cost a craftsman two weeks’ wages, but a cupboard, if carved, was twice the price, while one made from a more elegant wood might cost six times more. By the late seventeenth century, however, prices had dropped, and in the Netherlands middle-class housekeeping had come to revolve around two cupboards. One was usually for storing eating utensils, the other for linens – bedding and personal items such as shirts, collars and caps – coats, silver and gold items, and Bibles and prayer books, particularly if they had decorative metal hinges or mounts. These cupboards, and their contents, were status symbols, and therefore they were almost always placed in the voorhuis, the front room. A poem reminded a Dutch bride that ‘All the precious beauty in the world … [was] gathered in [her] cupboard’, but it was not for her alone; rather, it was a ‘treasure to be admired’ by ‘many guests’. China, delftware, pewter and silver were displayed in sets along the top of the cupboards (see plate section, no. 4). (This style did not travel. As late as the 1720s, Daniel Defoe looked back with little admiration to the habits of the late Queen Mary, English-born but resident in the Netherlands from the age of fifteen until her return as queen aged twenty-seven; she had, he noted, brought with her ‘the custom … [of] piling … china upon the tops of cabinets’, which he thought led to ‘fatal excesses’.)
Another new type of furniture, the chest-of-drawers, arrived in the same century. Drawers had been in use for two centuries, as a method of storing ecclesiastical documents. While tables had occasionally had a drawer under the flat surface, and the German Stollenschränke, chests on legs, also sometimes had one or two drawers under the main cupboard area, they were otherwise almost unknown outside the church world. It was at Versailles in 1692 that the first secular furniture in which drawers were the primary component made its debut: the chest-of-drawers, in French a commode, or ‘convenience’.* The new piece of furniture was wonderfully useful, and it spread swiftly, both geographically and down the economic scale. In the 1730s, walnut chests-of-drawers with an integrated glass-fronted display case above were the fashion among courtiers in Brunswick; by the end of the century more than half of working men in Paris had at least one simple chest-of-drawers. Now, as a Dutch poem instructed, ‘Everything has its place and everything in its place.’
Another innovation, also French, brought even greater changes to furniture design. Padded furniture had appeared in the seventeenth century, and the technique spread quickly among the highest in society, and even abroad: we know that by the late seventeenth century Whitehall Palace in London contained at least two upholstered chairs.* By the end of the century, padding was being added to the seats of chairs, and horsehair stuffing to their back-supports. The early method of stuffing, where padding was tacked directly on to the wood, was replaced by a more sophisticated method, where intervening stretchers allowed the padding to be suspended from a frame. The stuffing could now be held in place by stitching across the entire surface, which meant that larger areas could be upholstered. The stretcher also allowed the fabric coverings to be replaced, and now chairs became fashion items.
For centuries, chairs, tables, benches and other furniture had all remained lined up in rows against the walls unless they were in use, the centre of every room remaining empty most of the time. When needed, individual pieces of furniture were pulled into place, and then, after use, were again returned to the wall. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as the decorative element of furniture came to be considered equal to its utilitarian purpose, this arrangement began to seem old-fashioned. The more informal court-style of Louis XV led the way: here furniture was placed not to awe and impress, but to aid socialization. Chairs and tables were arranged in groups throughout a room, whether they were in use or not – it was almost as though now, in empty rooms, the furniture was socializing on its own. And with this change in emphasis, chairs began to be designed not merely for utility (in lesser houses), or for display (in the houses of the great), but foremost for both social interaction and comfort: they were wider, with their seats set lower to the ground, and, most importantly of all, they were upholstered. Ease now appears to have become desirable. And sure enough, the paintings of this period show people lying back in their chairs, or leaning casually on the arms of chaises. Upholstered furniture provoked a change in patterns of use; the changing use provoked further changes in design; the changes in design in turn encouraged new changes in patterns of behaviour. And so furniture that encouraged sociability became as important as furniture designed for display.
The first entirely new piece of seating designed for both sociability and comfort, the sofa, encouraged the shift. By its nature – upholstered, and with seating for two or more – the sofa was no longer about a single person’s display of authority. By 1743, Horace Walpole, that man of fashion, casually wrote in a letter, ‘I am not quite so much at my ease as on my own sofa’. His correspondent was forced to admit that he didn’t know what a sofa looked like, but he could not have remained ignorant for long. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the amount of seating in all households increased sharply, not coincidentally as upholstery techniques and padded furniture became more widespread. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, instead of the earlier paucity of chairs that surprises us today, houses began to be so full of chairs that it is difficult to imagine where they all went, or what purpose they served. In the seventeenth century, a barber-surgeon in Battersea owned elegant green and gilt hangings, a mirror, several tables, one fabric and two leather carpets, but just one ‘couch chair’ and one ‘great chair’; seating in his fashionable house was still mostly on stools. By 1774, a Hamburg merchant owned eighteen beechwood chairs, upholstered in matching sets of six; a century later, in 1877, the cartoonist Linley Sambourne’s London house contained sixty-six chairs, ten of them in the master bedroom. Among the wealthy, not only was there a superfluity of chairs, but they were frequently ‘bought together’, that is, they matched; they were for fashion, not utility, previously within the reach only of the wealthiest. What had been the prerogative of courts, or the very greatest houses, became increasingly common among the middling classes.
Until the first third of the nineteenth century, and later in many places, for most people below the rank of French kings, furniture, no matter how fashionable, remained pushed back against the walls. It was in Britain that the more informal style of furniture arrangement spread, under the influence of the Romantic movement, with its love of the picturesque, which prized the asymmetrical over classical order. In the drawing rooms, initially, of the middlingly prosperous in Britain it quickly became expected that furniture was permanently situated wherever it was deemed either comfortable or useful – by the fireside, by a window, by a communicating door, or in conversational groupings in the centre of the room. But outside the British prosperous middle-class, the radical overturning of a centuries-old habit took time to be accepted. One foreign visitor dismissed the practice: it made rooms look like furniture shops, he said. While grouped furniture today symbolizes rooms filled with sociability and conversation, the idiom of the time might suggest the opposite. In France and Germany, silence was known as ‘une conversation à l’Angloise’ [sic]. It may,
perhaps, therefore have been the very awkwardness of English social life that led to furniture being placed in more informal groups. One diarist recorded, ‘At first sight, society abroad often appears formal to English taste, because … people do not sit in all parts of the room. But foreigners do not feel under any particular restraint … and never feel the slightest scruple in traversing the empty space if they wish to converse with any one on the other side.’ The English, in contrast, he thought, used furniture ‘to remedy’ their native lack of sociability.
For decades after the new, more informal arrangements became common in all ranks of life, the style of the previous centuries remained a byword for old-fashioned stuffiness. In 1861, a woman complained that her husband’s family home was ‘exceptionally stiff and proper … you could not but feel if you moved a chair out of its place … it would of its own accord walk statelily [sic] home again … back to the wall.’*
As furniture moved permanently from the edges into the centre of rooms, smaller, lighter pieces of furniture became popular, defining individual sections of each room, and functioning as specialist aids to this new, more informal living style. Now small tables were set beside a chair to provide a place to put down a book, or next to a sofa for a cup and saucer, or nestled by the door to hold the household’s bedroom candles; sewing tables were moved to whichever seat had the best light. Bedrooms were furnished with dressing tables (although bedside tables had to wait until the nineteenth century in much of Britain and Germany, a chair generally serving this purpose until then), and delicate writing tables for women, smaller than the desks that were the preserve of men’s working spaces.
The Making of Home Page 13