Antique Victorian Carved Walnut Parlor Armchair, c. 1855–1880

The Piece

A carved walnut parlour armchair in the full Rococo Revival manner. The back is a spoon back, a balloon shape that curves in three dimensions rather than standing flat, framed by a shaped crest rail with a moulded edge and a carved volute at each shoulder. Open arms sweep forward on serpentine supports carved with a leaf at the crest and a cabochon at the foot, running straight on into cabriole front legs that finish in shaped, carved toes. The seat rail is serpentine on all four sides with a moulded edge following the curve.

The walnut has a warm mid-brown colour with the grain showing through, and the surface carries the small dents, rubs and lifted edges that a chair collects over a long life. The carving is cut in solid stock and finished by hand; the volutes are crisp and the two shoulders are not identical twins.

Upholstery is a later recover in a rose and burgundy figured jacquard, applied to the seat, the inside back and the arm pads. It is sound and clean but it is not original to the chair, and one arm pad has worked loose from its tacking along the inner edge.

History & Provenance

This chair came west. According to the family who sold it, it travelled from the East Coast and was carried to McGill, Nevada, where it stayed until Viridian Eclection acquired it in Reno from the grandson of the family who brought it. That is an oral provenance given by a descendant rather than a documented one, and it is offered here on those terms, but it holds together unusually well against the dates.

McGill sits in the Steptoe Valley in White Pine County, out on the eastern edge of Nevada. It began as a ranch and became a town almost overnight when the Steptoe Valley Smelting and Mining Company finished a copper smelter there; the furnaces lit on 15 May 1908 and the first copper shipped that August. The population went from almost nothing to 1,904 by 1910 and 2,864 by 1920. Kennecott took it over in 1932 and ran it as a company town until the copper price and the thinning ore closed the smelter in 1983, after which it was demolished. Around a thousand people still live there, a fraction of what it was.

So the chronology reads like this. The chair was made somewhere in the east in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. By the time it reached McGill the town could not have existed for long, which puts the journey in the smelter years, when families were arriving to work copper and bringing the good parlour furniture with them rather than buying new at the end of the line. The chair was already forty or fifty years old when it made the trip. It then sat in eastern Nevada for the better part of a century and came to Reno through the family, not through a saleroom.

As to the chair itself, this is the standard form of the American parlour armchair of the Rococo Revival, made when every furnished front room wanted a suite: a gentleman's chair with open arms, a lower lady's chair without them, a sofa and side chairs to match. What separates a period example from the twentieth-century copies of the same shape is how deep the work goes. Here the back is genuinely dished and shaped through its thickness rather than sawn from a flat board, the arm supports and front legs are cut from solid walnut in a continuous serpentine rather than glued up, and the carving has the small asymmetries of a hand tool. No maker's mark or stencil is visible, which is usual; the great majority of these chairs were made anonymously by workshops that never labelled anything. On the construction it is offered as c. 1855–1880.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A single Victorian armchair is more useful than a suite. It anchors a corner, holds a bedroom, or sits at the end of a dining table where it gives one person a better chair than everyone else has. The spoon back is the reason it is comfortable, and it is why the form survived long enough to be copied for a century.

Recovered in something plain, a linen or a heavy cotton in an off white, it stops reading as period furniture and starts reading as sculpture with a seat. The frame is good enough to justify the work.