Clues to Antique Chairs

By Fred Taylor

Some pieces of antique furniture are like an open book. A casual familiarity with the trade allows you to readily identify the period of a piece of Golden Oak or to correctly label a Victorian Rococo Revival couch. A number of technical elements can easily tell the age of a drop front desk and a bed is a dead giveaway based on the hardware of the siderails. But what about a chair? Chairs are not quite so open about themselves, and like a friend’s skittish pet, it may take a while to get to know it— and for it to know you.

The first thing to know about a chair is what kind of chair is it? Chairs and similar seating platforms have been made for thousands of years, but in modern times in the Western world chairs boil down to one of three types—turner’s chairs, Windsor chairs and cabinetmaker’s chairs.

Turner’s chairs are exactly what they sound like; they are assembled from pieces turned on a lathe, and usually employ a round mortise and tenon joint for the construction. Everything is round in the eyes of a turner. This type of chair was one of the first that was mass produced because of the simplicity of the elements and the construction.

A Windsor chair consists of a more or less flat seat, into which legs are inserted from below, again using a generally round mortise and tenon joint. The upper section of the chair consists of turned spindles inserted in the seat and topped, usually, by the bent hoop that composes the equivalent of a crest rail. The distinguishing feature of a Windsor is that no element of the chair is continuous from top to floor. Almost everything has a terminus in the seat except the lower stretchers which connect leg to leg, back hoops that form arms, and crest rails that sit impaled on stiles which are implanted into the seat but do not contact the floor.

Cabinetmaker’s chairs are made from sawn and shaped elements, often elaborately carved. The normal joint in this type of chair is the rectangular mortise and tenon and in the later incarnations of the industrial age, the dowel joint. The most commonly seen chair in today’s market is the cabinetmaker’s chair.

Cabinetmaker’s chairs, at first, seem to be the hardest to read. No joinery is visible except the occasional through tenon peeking out the rear stile or the apparent presence of a pin, the “true nail” or “trunnel,” securing a mortise and tenon joint. Without these scant clues and without performing some destructive testing, like opening a joint, it is very difficult to tell if the chair was assembled with mortise and tenons or dowels.

But there very often is another clue that can be used if it can be seen. That is the manner in which the corners of the seat frame are blocked. Since most cabinetmaker’s chairs are upholstered, access to corner blocking is not always easy unless the chair has a removable slip seat or unless you are able to remove some of the bottom dust cover to see into the interior. But if you can get there you may find some real help in identifying the chair.

The blocking in mid 18th century chairs was almost always done using a soft wood with several small blocks in each corner. The grain of the blocks usually runs vertically and since all fasteners of that period were handmade, very few 18th century corner blocks have original nails or screws in them. In keeping with the concept of “workmanlike manner,” i.e. if it doesn’t show don’t spend any time on it, most original 18th century corner blocks are unfinished, just like the insides of the seat rails.

By the beginning of the 19th century, many cabinetmakers were no longer using the corner blocks and instead relied on a type of cleat to span the corner and connect the front rail to the side rail, bypassing actual contact with the corner altogether. These narrow cleats were usually a hardwood with the grain running horizontally and were glued into notches cut into the tops of the rails. They were fairly shallow and did not extend the full depth of the rails.

By mid century, with the Industrial Revolution reaching maturity and the factory system in full swing, corner blocking became more elaborate. Many Victorian era pieces, especially later in the period, had blocks shaped to cover each corner completely, securing two rails and the leg. In addition to being glued many blocks of the time also had the newly introduced, machine made, readily available gimlet screw to help hold it fast.

At the beginning of the 20th century, another technological innovation influenced corner blocks. That was the development of commercial plywood. This new type of surface became the seat bottom of choice in much of the mid grade furniture production of the first half of the century. Some way was needed to secure the new seating material to the chair and screwing it to the corner blocks was the logical step. Corner blocks of the Depression era emulated those of 100 years prior in that once again they did not actually cover the corner but only connected rail to rail. But this time they were glued and screwed and had another hole in the center to accommodate the seat bottom fastener.

With the advent of strong dowel joints, reinforced with new resin glues, corner blocks almost became superfluous to the structure of the chair. Their new job focused primarily on holding and supporting the seat.

So the enigmatic chair does have something to tell you after all. You just have to get to know it a little better.

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More likely than not, it is not bamboo. Bamboo is what old fishing poles look like, brownish with large segments and obvious growth joints every 10 inches or so. Some furniture is made of bamboo that is bent to shape and wrapped with natural fiber binding or leather strips to secure the joints, but usually, the seating portion is upholstered or has a loose cushion on it because bamboo is not very comfortable. So unless you are sitting in a bamboo chair, you don’t have a bamboo seat.

What it also probably isn’t is rattan. Rattan is the stem of a type of tropical palm tree most often found in commercial quantities in Borneo. The stem has its leaves removed and the outer skin scraped off. It can then be bent to shape to make furniture. Larger pieces are steam bent, and smaller ones are merely soaked to provide flexibility. Larger pieces of rattan look like bamboo with the hard outer shell removed. Rattan furniture closely resembles bamboo furniture. It also usually has wrapped joints, but in newer pieces, the wrapping is often plastic made to look like leather or fiber and actually conceals a nailed or screwed joint. Seating in rattan closely follows the pattern of seating in bamboo furniture.

Perhaps it’s wicker. Perhaps. Wicker furniture has been around for centuries, and some of it is quite sturdy. Old wicker is made of small diameter (1/4 inch or less) but long lengths of willow or small rattan palms. These lengths are wrapped around a structural frame of maple or birch to create the impression of a woven piece of furniture, which often features elaborate embellishments made of individual stems rolled or curled in patterns.

Usually, only true wicker chairs like this have wicker seats.

This type of wicker furniture is all hand made and is relatively expensive. On the other hand is “paper” wicker. This is a late-19th-century invention of brown craft paper wrapped tightly around a wire core and can be woven on a special loom in a factory, which accounts for the proliferation of Victorian wicker around the turn of the 20th century. But again, wicker is almost never used as seating material except in a wicker piece of furniture.

Next is rush. Rush is a seating material made by twisting some substance into long strands of about the same diameter as wicker. It is then woven in a pattern around the top stretchers of a chair seat, creating a type of suspension seat with no wood visible around it. In some chairs, it is woven around a flat wood frame that sits inside another frame in the chair. Rush, like wicker, comes in two basic varieties. The original form was made of very tightly twisted, wet cattail leaves and gets very brittle after a number of years. This is called “natural” or “cattail” rush. The newer version, euphemistically called “fiber” rush, is similar to paper wicker in that it is essentially twisted brown or variegated craft paper but without the wire core. It usually requires a top coating of some sort to protect it from moisture. Many newer pieces of furniture imported from the Far East are once again appearing with natural rush in the seats.

The seat of this chair is made of twisted rush woven in the standard four-section pattern.

Cane is just that—cane. It is the outer skin of cane cut in very thin flat strips that can be woven almost like fabric to make a seat surface. In woven form, it is very durable and has been known to last centuries. An earlier form of cane seating is called “seven strand hand cane,” “hand cane” or “hole cane.” After soaking in glycerin or water, seven (more or less) individual strands are woven in and out of holes drilled through the wood of the seat, creating any number of patterns. If you turn the chair upside down, you can see the loops of cane under the seat going from hole to hole. The most common pattern has a series of octagonal-shaped holes in the material. After installation and drying, the cane can be stained and finished to match the chair or to match other older seats within the same set. This type of handwork is relatively expensive, and fewer people in the U.S. do it every year. It is a dying art here but is still common in European-produced furniture.

On the left is a 19th-century chair seat made of hand cane woven through holes in the seat. With the chair turned upside down (right), it is easy to see the individual loops of the cane through the seat.

Another type of cane is called “sheet cane” or “pressed cane.” This comes from the manufacturer (in the Far East) in prewoven sheets in a variety of styles and sizes and is installed in a groove cut near the edge of the seat. It is worked wet after soaking awhile so that as it dries, it becomes very tight and strong across the seat opening. It is held in place by a glued-in border called reed spline.

Pressed cane is easily identified by the reed spline that holds the woven cane into a groove in the seat.

Since it has no holes drilled through the seat, it leaves a stronger seat frame than does hole cane. It, too, can be finished to match something else. The newest twist in cane seating in inexpensive furniture is paper cane. It looks exactly like natural cane except it is made of woven flat strips of paper embedded with a nylon cord to give it strength and is finished to look like real cane.

So what do you have in your chairs?

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– Fred Taylor is the American Furniture Worthologist and an expert in furniture restoration. He’s published numerous articles on antiques on WorthPoint and in “Antique Trader,” “Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine,” “Northeast Magazine, “Victorian Decorating and Lifestyles,” “Professional Refinishing” and “The Antique Shoppe Newspaper.” Read more about Fred on his Worthologist profile, and check out his book “How To Be A Furniture Detective” and Fred and Gail Taylor’sDVD, “Identification of Older & Antique Furniture” on their very informative Web site, Furniture Detective.

Other articles by Fred Taylor:

Identifying Wood Species—Part I

Identifying Wood Species—Part II

Identifying Wood Species—Part III

A Fortune from the Kitchen Table

Understanding Antiques—the Arts and Crafts Movement

Understanding Antiques—the Arts and Crafts Movement Pt. 2