Tub Chairs

It is not unusual for some of us to take for granted what some have called one of the comforts of the 20th century, which is the well-proportioned armchair found in the French court and which only the king was permitted to enjoy while his subjects looked on in abject envy while sitting in backless tools.

The seat that became commonly known to us as the tub chair was to the style-conscious French, the epitome of civil comfort and was used to set the tone for comfort is bars not only just in France but in all Europe. This armchair grew more democratic, and with that became more widely accepted as it got smaller and prettier even as its portability grew. Today, this chair is known only as the tub chair.

To understand how it acquired that name, we need to look at one Thomas Sheraton, who in his epic work the 'Cabinet Dictionary' in 1804," was an competent consultant in the world of American furniture.  In his publication, Thomas states that the rounded-back chairs that we know so much were really revolutionized by French King Louis XV, since its references appear quite repetitvely in many French publications and encyclopedias.

This chair was then brought over to America, more specifically Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. All this was in the closing years of the 18th century and here the name 'tub" stuck. While the high-back version of the tub model later became transformed to resemble the easy chair, it was not that common in the America the way it was with the French and the English.

In the 17th century a Boston cabinetmaker, George Bright, made numerous low-back tub chairs as an experiement and these were ferried to the new state house in Boston in later 1797. These had not yet quite resembled the ones we know today and were only abuot theree feet high with an overall depth of only two feet. They were thus much deeper than they were wide. This chair was named by Charles F. Montgomery, who often wrote on American interior design, the tub chair and he states that this is one of the most interestimg surviving chairs of its type and was also one of the great cultural crossover to come from Europe to the United States.

Many American historians wonder how tub chair could survive so many decades and hold its own the way it did but it was discovered that the the English and post-English American and Victorian era loved these types of curved seats. The rococo revival greatly popularized these tub chairs and even made thenm resurface in France all the way to the period of the 20th century.

Thus is the history of the tub chair as we know it. There have been many recent modifications of late as designer furniture stores join the fray and also comeup with their own unique versions of the tub chair. Look out for more of these designs in the days to come.

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