Continuity and innovation: recliners, sofa beds, rocking chairs, and folding chairs

Magazine Antiques, May, 2002 by Page Talbott

With the rise of the new middle class during the nineteenth century, a whole new breed of craftsmen began to design furniture. Compared to their predecessors, these furniture makers were often unschooled in the art of cabinetmaking. Some were purely businessmen, others were inventors, while still others had worked in furniture factories but had little formal training in the trade. Much of what these workers produced was in direct response to the growing desire among consumers for comfortable, space-saving, and movable furniture--all-important considerations for an upwardly mobile clientele.

Called by one historian "constituent furniture," (1) these goods were designed primarily to be functional, while beauty, superior craftsmanship, and integration of ornament, so important to designers to the wealthy, took a backseat. Much of this new class of nineteenth-century furniture has been described as innovative--and indeed it was--but, at the same time, many of these objects strongly reflect a continuity of design and form found in furniture from the beginning of time. Indeed, many of the furniture forms that one might assume to be modern inventions were, in fact, the products of the genius and necessities of much earlier times.

This timelessness can be illustrated in four different furniture forms that exemplify the inventiveness of the past two centuries: the reclining chair, the sofa bed, the rocking chair, and the folding chair. The introduction and widespread acceptance of these forms has changed the course of furniture history.

Of great concern to the designers of the nineteenth century was the need for comfort in seating furniture, a trend that coincided with the invention of a wide variety of springs and a reaction against the generally stiff, unyielding furniture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The increased prominence of the upholstery trade, and the new aesthetic appeal of "stuffed furniture," as it was called, all contributed to the importance of upholstered furniture during the Victorian period.

While certain earlier forms, notably the easy chair of the seventeenth century and the French bergere of the eighteenth century, made concessions to comfort in seating, it was not until the nineteenth century that most seating furniture was purposely and primarily designed to be comfortable. Even seating postures changed, with the upright position seldom selected and the graceful and languid lounge position becoming de rigueur. Nineteenth-century furniture designers invented chairs to foster these new relaxed positions.

The reclining chair, in its multitude of variations, received attention and approval early in the nineteenth century with, among others, the publication in England in 1813 of William Pocock's Reclining Patent Chair (Pl. I). Lest one think that reclining chairs were first invented in the nineteenth century, however, one need only remember seventeenth- and eighteenth- century daybeds (see pl. III). With adjustable backs supported by chains, these lounges incorporated the same mechanical principles in practice centuries later.

The Pocock chair did, nonetheless, introduce an important mechanical innovation, which sets many nineteenth-century recliners off from their predecessors. Pocock's recliner had brass ratchets on the top of both side rails. This type of reclining chair called "automatic" or "self-reclining" by some makers, reclined by a combined action of the arms and back of the chair moving simultaneously, a movement that in later chairs was facilitated by internal gliding mechanisms. Some of these chairs reclined to certain set positions, while others could be reclined to suit the exact position desired.

Most reclining chairs were fitted with footrests, some were added when one wished to recline, others permanently attached and recessed in the chair rail, sometimes to be supported by wooden legs or metal braces when in use. In other chairs, legs automatically appeared when the chair was made to recline.

Among the best known of nineteenth-century recliners was one of the earliest American models, manufactured about 1830 by William Hancock (1794-c. 1852) of Boston. (2) Some twenty-five years later, in 1855, the firm of Browne and Ash, upholsterers and cabinetmakers at 421 Broadway New York City, illustrated "improved Patent Self Acting Reclining, Elevating, and Revolving Recumbent Chairs and Sofas." (3) A reclining chair made by the Philadelphia cabinetmaker George J. Henkels (1819-1883) "graduates its position to the will of the person, and enjoys the merit of utility without complication of machinery." (4) And for students of the later nineteenth century, the name of George Jacob Hunzinger comes readily to mind as the designer of reclining and folding chairs (see Pls. Va, Vb). (5)

Another well-known reclining chair was the Rip Van Winkle Reclining Rocker, patented in 1887 and 1888 and manufactured by the P. C. Lewis Manufacturing Company in Catskill, New York. (6) With the addition of the rocker feature, one could rock to sleep in the already comfortable upholstered recliner.