The chairs in this section span about a century and illustrate a period of remarkable stylistic and material change. Some types of chairs, such as the upholstered backstool and its armed counterpart (8, 9), changed little during the course of the seventeenth century.   The simple, boxy form was economical to make and to […]

  Panel-back chairs are the most numerous type of early British chair to survive. Their survival owes much to solid construction—with pegged mortise and tenon joints—and durable materials (chiefly oak). This system of construction, employed by joiners throughout the British Isles, produced predominantly rectilinear forms that were nevertheless capable, through variations in proportion and differences […]