Are you sitting comfortably?

In 1964 the furniture historian Bernard D. Cotton, who specializes in the vernacular tradition, bought a chair. This led to the acquisition of nearly four hundred others, all made by regional English makers. Cotton then researched the history of regional chairs in general and the specific background of each of his examples. His book The English Regional Chair (1990) remains the standard reference on the subject.

When in 2002 it became obvious that this large collection of chairs would need a permanent home, the collector convinced the Geffrye Museum in London to take it on. The museum is dedicated to the domestic interior. Forty of the chairs in the Cotton Collection are on view there until June 12 in an exhibition entitled The English Regional Chair.

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The chairs displayed, mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are of only two types: windsors and rush-seated ladder-back chairs. They come from one or another of the six regions the collector has identified: the Thames Valley, East Anglia, North East, South West, West Midlands, and North West. Accompanying each chair is a wall panel label detailing when and where it was made, and where there is no maker's mark there is an explanation of how the attribution was made. There is no catalogue of the exhibition.

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