Answering a Restored Interest in the Antique Settee
More than one picture of an antique settee shows up in the posted list of rare antiques, items now available to online shoppers. Those are the shoppers that have landed on the Ruby Lane web site.
That web site offers for sale a polychrome antique French Settee, an exquisite piece with a lacquered finish. It also posts a picture of a fine antique that reveals the style of the Victorian parlor chair. This rare piece has a button tuft back and similar padding on the arms.
Another antique settee, one with padded arms, and one included in the Ruby Lane collection, is an 18th Century piece. This painted settee has the carved detail work that is found on most settees.
A strikingly different sort of settee and one that must have delighted one child demonstrates the variations found in any collection of these now rare pieces of furniture. The twisted carvings on this one seat cannot be found any other settee that is offered to those that visit the Ruby Lane web site.
A short distance below this children’s chair, an online shopper can find a picture of a caned settee. This caned seat must be similar to the type of settee that was in the mind of the people at Restoration Hardware, when they designed a line of cushions, cushions for settees.
While not shown in the RH Garden catalogue, the antique settee that was in the mind of those designers must have contained woven cane, cane that resembled the woven material in the garden pieces that catalogue readers can discover and admire. While these caned seats belong in an outdoor setting, restorationhardware.com also has furnishings for use indoors.
Some of those furnishings copy the look of the traditional Chesterfield chair. They are covered with tobacco like leather, and they have both a button tuft back and rounded arms. One of these soft leather pieces is the Buster Leather Chair. The RH catalogue shows such a chair in a room with a coffee colored leather Ottoman and a French Casement Cabinet.
The published material on the leather chairs from the RH factory mentions a recliner. One wonders if this is the sort of recliner that can give a massage to any person that sits in it. That is the kind of thing that creators of the earliest leather chairs never could have imagined.
That does not mean that the men who used to gather in a room filled with such chairs would not have welcomed the chance to have a massage. They were looking for some type of relief, relief from their day-to-day concerns. They often smoked cigars, in order to feel a bit more relaxed.
While men smoked cigars in one room, the women would retire to a different room. It might have been a room with an antique settee. While seated on that fine example of 19th Century artisanship, those women probably shared their decorating ideas. At that time, they drew their ideas largely from printed material. At that time there was no Internet, and there were no virtual furniture stores.