Klismos
Encyclopedia
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
chair, familiar from depictions on painted pottery and in bas-reliefs from the mid-fifth century BCE onwards. In epic, klismos signifies an armchair, but no specific description is given of its form; in Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
xxiv, after Priam's appeal, Achilles rises from his thronos, raises the elder man to his feet, goes out to prepare Hector's body for decent funeral and returns, to take his place on his klismos.
A vase-painting of a satyr
Satyr
In Greek mythology, satyrs are a troop of male companions of Pan and Dionysus — "satyresses" were a late invention of poets — that roamed the woods and mountains. In myths they are often associated with pipe-playing....
carrying a klismos chair on his shoulder shows how light such chairs were. The curved, tapered legs of the klismos chair sweep forward and rearward, offering stability. The rear legs sweep continuously upward to support a wide concave backrest like a curved tablet, which supports the sitter's shoulders, or which may be low enough to lean an elbow on. The seat was built of four wooden turned staves, morticed into the legs; a web of cording or leather strips supported a cushion or a pelt. The klismos was a specifically Greek invention, without detectable earlier inspiration.
The klismos fell from general favour during the Hellenistic period
Hellenistic Greece
In the context of Ancient Greek art, architecture, and culture, Hellenistic Greece corresponds to the period between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the annexation of the classical Greek heartlands by Rome in 146 BC...
; nevertheless, the theatre of Dionysus at the foot of the Acropolis
Acropolis
Acropolis means "high city" in Greek, literally city on the extremity and is usually translated into English as Citadel . For purposes of defense, early people naturally chose elevated ground to build a new settlement, frequently a hill with precipitous sides...
, Athens, of the first century CE, has carved representations of klismoi. Where a klismos is represented in Roman portraits of seated individuals, the sculptures are copies of Greek works.
The klismos was revived during the second, archaeological phase of European neoclassicism
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...
. Klismos chairs were first widely seen in Paris in the furniture made for the painter Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era...
by Georges Jacob
Georges Jacob
Georges Jacob was one of the two most prominent Parisian master menuisiers, producing carved, painted and gilded beds and seat furniture and upholstery work for the French royal châteaux, in the early Neoclassical style that is usually associated with Louis Seize.Jacob arrived in Paris in 1754 and...
in 1788, to be used as props in David's historical paintings, where the new sense of historicism
Historicism
Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
required visual authenticity. It would be hard to find a French klismos chair earlier than the ones designed by the architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu
Jean-Jacques Lequeu
Jean-Jacques Lequeu was a French draughtsman and architect.Born in Rouen, he won a scholarship to go to Paris, but following the French revolution his architectural career never took off....
in 1786 for a decor in the "Etruscan style" for the hôtel Montholon, boulevard Montmartre, and executed by Jacob; the furnishings have disappeared, but the watercolor designs are conserved in the Cabinet des Estampes. Simon Jervis has noted that Joseph Wright of Derby
Joseph Wright of Derby
Joseph Wright , styled Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution"....
included the tablet of an approximation of a klismos chair in his Penelope Unraveling Her Web, 1783-84 (J. Paul Getty Museum
J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is an art museum. It has two locations, one at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, and one at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California...
).
In London, early klismos chairs were designed by Thomas Hope for his house in Duchess Street, London, which George Beaumont
George Beaumont
George Beaumont may refer to:*Sir George Beaumont, 4th Baronet , English MP for Leicester*Sir George Beaumont, 7th Baronet , British MP for Bere Alston, amateur painter, patron and collector of Turner and others...
had described as early as 1804 as "more a Museum than anything else"; klismos chairs were illustrated by Hope in several variations in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807), the record of his semi-public house-museum. Klismos chairs in their purest form furnished Hope's Picture Gallery (pl. II) and the Second Room containing Greek Vases (pl. IV), but the swept legs featured in variations on the classical theme illustrated in other plates. Henry Moses' illustration of genteel company playing cards seated on klismos chairs appeared in Hope's Designs of Modern Costume (c. 1812).
By the presence of fashionable klismos chairs and a collection of Greek vases, a self-portrait of Adam Buck
Adam Buck
Adam Buck was an Irish neo-classical portraitist and miniature painter principally active in London.-Life:...
and his family, significantly, was formerly thought to represent Thomas Hope. Klismos chairs were designed for Packington Hall
Packington Hall
Packington Hall is a 17th century mansion situated at Great Packington, near Meriden, Warwickshire, England the seat of the Earl of Aylesford. It is a Grade II* listed building....
, Warwickshire, by Joseph Bonomi
Joseph Bonomi
Joseph Bonomi or Giuseppi Bonomi may mean either of a father-son pair notable in architecture and sculpture:*Joseph Bonomi the Elder , architect*Joseph Bonomi the Younger , sculptor, Egyptologist...
.
In Philadelphia, the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe designed a set of klismos chairs for an interior in the most advanced neoclassical taste for William Waln's drawing-room, c. 1808. Latrobe's design, painted cream and red on a black background, the "Etruscan" color range, included a panel of caning beneath the tablet backrest and legs that splayed outwards to the sides as well as the front. For the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
, Latrobe's designs of 1809 for klismos chairs are cautiously reinforced with stretchers to render them more sturdy. A range of early 19th century American klismos chairs were included in the exhibition "Classical Taste in America, 1800-1840", Baltimore Museum of Art, 1993.
Such severely academic revivals might be compromised by more familiar features of the chair-maker's usual practice: an early 19th-century klismos chair by J.E. Höglander, Stockholm has a padded backrest, supported on five slender colonettes, and the faces of the legs are lightly paneled.
The classicizing phase of Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
allied with Art Deco
Art Deco
Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...
found the simple lines of the klismos once again in favor: klismos chairs designed by the Danish Edvard Thomspon were illustrated in Architekten, 1922. In 1960, T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings
T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings
Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings was a British-born architect and furniture designer.Robsjohn-Gibbings studied architecture at London University. He afterwards worked briefly as a naval architect, designing ocean liner interiors, and then as art director for a motion picture studio...
met Greek cabinetmakers Susan and Eleftherios Saridis, and, together, they created the Klismos line of furniture, recreating ancient Greek furnishings with some accuracy, including klismos chairs.