80 
House & Garden 
SPRING AND 
HOMEBUILDING 
go hand in hand. It is high time 
to be perfecting plans for the home 
of your dreams—be it cottage or 
castle. It will be to your interest 
as a prospective builder to read in 
our fascinating folio of attractive 
house designs, why 
Arkansas 
Soft Pine 
should be used, particularly as 
interior woodwork. In addition to 
being naturally adapted in grain 
and texture to an unlimited choice 
of enameled or stained treatment, 
this wood has the distinct advan¬ 
tage of comparatively moderate 
cost—a most important considera¬ 
tion. A copy of the folio, together 
with finished samples, will be sent 
on request. Write now. 
Ar\ansas Soft Pine Is Trade Marked 
and Sold by Dealers East o^ the Roches 
Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau 
432 Boyle Building 
Little Rock • Arkansas 
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The Ancestor of the Chair 
(Continued from page 78) 
nowned throughout Europe. The Ger¬ 
mans learned from them and Italian 
craftsmen visited France where, under 
the patronage of Francois Premier fur¬ 
niture came into great demand. 
Throughout this whole period of the 
Renaissance the stool more than held 
its own. One finds evidence of this 
fact in hundreds of paintings by the old 
masters. In Rome, Florence, Venice, 
Milan, Genoa and Naples stools were 
one of the chief products of the furni¬ 
ture makers. 
It is only natural that so few of the 
finer specimens should have come down 
to us, for the house owners of the 
Renaissance were extravagant and found 
it more to their convenience to replace 
stools that showed wear with com¬ 
pletely new ones than to have the old 
ones refurbished. Those that have sur¬ 
vived the vicissitudes of this caprice 
are, in the main, such as adorned state 
apartments in palaces and there received 
much care and little wear. 
It is by no means impossible to find 
Renaissance pieces of the sort but 
naturally one would have to have a 
long purse to make possible the acquisi¬ 
tion of a genuine Renaissance stool 
unless one chanced to discover a fine 
one in private ownership in the land of 
its origin. However, very fine repro¬ 
ductions, conscientiously made and in 
themselves very beautiful indeed, are 
procurable at possible prices. When such 
pieces are upholstered in genuine fabrics 
of the period they indicate they are by 
no means to be scorned, though of 
course they lack the greater interest 
which undeniable authenticity always 
gives to a piece of furniture. 
Italian Influence in England 
When feudal life came practically to 
an end, the Renaissance molded a new 
mode of living. Henry VIII of Eng¬ 
land, desirous of emulating the innova¬ 
tions of his neighbor across the channel, 
sought to tempt the artist craftsmen of 
Frangois’ court to come to England. 
Italian workmen did go to London and 
soon fine furniture and rich furnishings 
of every description were in vogue. 
Even before Henry VIII’s reign, 
Henry VII had invited such artists as 
Jean de Mabuse and Torrigiano to his 
court and they and others gave impetus 
to the English Renaissance. When Hans 
Holbein arrived at Henry VIII’s court, 
the influence of this artist upon art of 
every sort in England became marked. 
As Arthur Hayden remarks, the florid 
manner of the • Renaissance was then 
tempered in England with the broader 
treatment of the Northern school. The 
art, too, of the Flemish woodcarvers 
found sympathetic reception. 
The Tudor Style 
This blending of Italian and Flemish 
styles produced that which has come to 
be known as the Tudor style. Through¬ 
out the history of furniture in England 
—the Oak Period (16th and early 17th 
Century), the Walnut Period (late 17th 
and early 18th Century) and the Ma¬ 
hogany Period (beginning with George 
Hi’s reign)—the designs of stools have 
kept pace with those of other pieces, 
and period characteristics are strongly 
impressed upon them. 
With the accession of James I, the 
Tudor style in furniture did not, im¬ 
mediately, give place to that which was 
developed in the reign of James and 
called Jacobean. However, stool furni¬ 
ture quickly responded to new fashions, 
as some of the pieces in the collection 
of Lord Sackville at Knole attest. There 
we see the richly upholstered and fringed 
stool which probably is representative 
of the seats of those who sat “below 
the salt.” The stool furniture under the 
Stuarts is all interesting. Many historic 
pieces of the period have been repro¬ 
duced by modern cabinet makers. 
The Walnut Period 
With William and Mary and Queen 
Anne the Walnut Period found still 
other styles of stool furniture intro¬ 
duced, conforming in general charac¬ 
teristics with the other pieces of this 
reign influenced in- design by Grinling 
Gibbons and Sir Christopher Wren. 
Marquetry and lacquer-work became 
fashionable in Queen Anne’s day, and 
marquetry and lacquered stools must 
have been fairly abundant, although 
they have now to be sought with 
patience and hope. 
French Styles 
Perhaps no period furniture has been 
more prolific in stool pieces than that 
of the French from Louis Quatorze 
down through the First Empire. Like 
other pieces of furniture of the Louis 
Quatorze Period stools followed de¬ 
signs based on architectural principles. 
With the encouragement to tapestry 
weaving given by the State, stool up¬ 
holstery became sumptuous in effect. 
Louis XIV spent over 500,000,000 francs 
on building, decorating and furnishing 
Versailles. 
Under Louis XV the studied magnifi¬ 
cence of his predecessor gave way to a 
simpler style, which later departed from 
its initial elegance until much of the 
later Louis Quinze furniture of this 
period became a confusion of rococo 
incongruity. 
One may here remark that what the 
decoration of Louis Quatorze suffered 
at the hands of Louis Quinze, the deco¬ 
ration styles of the latter met a like 
fate, in turn, under Louis-Philippe, so 
determined was each French monarch 
to contrive a decorative style that should 
obliterate that of his predecessors. 
Under the influence of Madame de i 
Pompadour and Jean Frangois Rieseuer 1 
the close of the Louis Quinze Period was i 
marked with a simpler style which was i 
to hold over into the reign of Louis 
XVI. Indeed the Louis Seize furniture ! 
is marked by elegance, simplicity and 
the sweeping away of rococo ornament, 
as we may see by the furniture in the 
boudoir of Marie Antoinette at Fon¬ 
tainebleau. 
The furniture of the Empire Period 
was the result of Napolean I’s passion 
to revive classical models and his desire 1 
to create a new style in conformity to : 
his notion of the grandeur of antiquity. 
This spirit of classicism, pseudo though 
it was, affected furniture design tre¬ 
mendously. One of its forms is seen in 
David’s famous Portrait of Madame 
Recamier in the Louvre, a picture 
familiar to everyone. Here we see de¬ 
picted a typical footstool of Empire 
design. 
The Empire furniture influenced Eng¬ 
lish makers as the pieces of the brothers 
Adam and of Thomas Sheraton show. 
But French Empire furniture itself never 
appears to have been very warmly re- ' 
ceived in England. Instead Chippen¬ 
dale, Sheraton, the four brothers Adam 
and Heppelwhite evolved styles which 
came to hold their undisputed sway, to 
produce furniture of a sort that was 
not surpassed in the century that fol¬ 
lowed them. 
Collecting Stools 
Perhaps this brief outline of furniture’s 
progress will hold hint of the attrac¬ 
tions of the stool as a hobby for col¬ 
lectors, as something which furniture 
collectors might well specialize in since, 
as I have already Intimated, our houses 
more often than not are lacking in fur¬ 
niture pieces of the sort, notwithstanding 
the fact that throughout the centuries 
stools have never been out of fashion. 
