The Georgian and Regency sofa: from walnut settee to Grecian couch

In brief. Between 1714 and 1837 the sofa stopped being a state object and became drawing-room furniture: walnut gave way to mahogany, the chair-back settee and the fully stuffed sofa appeared side by side, and by 1830 the Museum of the Home can say that sofas had become common in ordinary homes. The engine of change was print — Chippendale’s Director of 1754, Hepplewhite’s Guide of 1788, Sheraton’s Drawing-Book and Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture of 1807 — which carried one national style to every provincial workshop. Under the cover the method was still stuffed-over horsehair on linen webbing, until the coil spring, patented by the London upholsterer Samuel Pratt in the late 1820s, arrived as the period closed.

Earliest dated settee here

1722Carved walnut, gilt and gesso, from Glemham Hall, Suffolk

The pattern book

1754Chippendale’s Director, sold from his house in St Martin’s Lane

Neoclassical sofa

1764–65Adam design, Chippendale make, for Sir Lawrence Dundas

The Grecian couch

1805Gillow’s gilded couch for Kinmel Park, with bolster and squab

The coil spring

1820sSamuel Pratt, upholsterer, patentee of the coil upholstery spring

What did an early Georgian settee look like?

An early Georgian settee was a chair frame stretched wide: a walnut or gilt-gesso frame on cabriole legs, a tall raked back, out-swept scrolled arms and a cover of the richest silk the house could afford. The V&A’s settee of 1722 from Glemham Hall in Suffolk is exactly this — carved walnut, gessoed and gilded, its arched seat rails carved with lambrequins and acanthus, its upholstered back and arms covered in a brocade of green, salmon and silver edged with silver braid. It belongs to a set, and it was made, the museum suggests, when alterations were carried out at the hall; a settee in 1722 was still commissioned with the room, not bought from stock.

What lay under that brocade is known from a suite made ten years later. Around 1732 Sir Robert Walpole furnished the State Apartment at Houghton Hall in Norfolk; William Kent designed the state bed, but the seat furniture was, in the V&A’s view, entirely the work of the chair-maker Thomas Roberts junior. The sofa is carved and gilded walnut on cabriole legs with lion masks and paw feet, covered in green silk velvet trimmed with braid and cord. Its companion chair keeps its original stuffing: linen webbing, a linen ticking base cloth, horsehair and linen stuffing covers, with a loose velvet cover over the top and a “scarf” stitched across the back to protect the silk from hair powder. That is the whole Georgian method in one object, and it would not change in substance for a hundred years.

The grandest version is William Hallett’s settee of 1735–40, made in London for Palladian parade rooms: walnut carved with cornucopiae, swags of fruit and satyr masks, a Greek key along the seat rail, the seat and back in silk damask, and originally oil-gilded all over. Below this level, fashion was home-made. A canvaswork settee cover of 1728–40 in the V&A, worked in wool and silk in tent and cross stitch, was one of a set with six chair covers, embroidered by an amateur — probably a woman working at home — from William Kent’s illustrations to Gay’s Fables. The Museum of the Home’s parlour of 1745 shows the middling result: wooden chairs with red cushions round a tripod table, and no sofa at all.

Why did mahogany replace walnut?

Mahogany replaced walnut because it could be carved crisply, spanned wide seat rails without joints, and took a polish that suited the sharper lines of mid-century design; by the 1760s it was the wood of the best London seat furniture. The sofa at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, dated about 1765–70 and attributed to Chippendale’s firm at St Martin’s Lane, is a mahogany frame on beech: a rectangular padded back, a seat with a loose cushion between scroll-over arms, four square-section legs with raked back feet. Its legs match a set of twenty-one chairs that Chippendale probably supplied in 1766, and the National Trust calls the library table he sent to Nostell in 1766–67 the finest piece of mahogany furniture he ever made.

The same wood made possible the double-chair-back settee, a form that treats a sofa as two or three chairs joined at the hip. The V&A’s mahogany chinoiserie settee of about 1750–75 is carved in the solid with pierced fretwork in its two raked chair backs and swept arms, on six square legs joined by pierced stretchers, with an upholstered seat — and the museum warns that many surviving settees of this type were actually made between about 1850 and 1900. Chair-back settees sit at one end of the period’s range; at the other stands the fully stuffed sofa, and the two coexisted for the rest of the century.

What did Robert Adam and neoclassicism do to the sofa?

Neoclassicism turned the sofa into architecture: designed by the architect for a specific wall, carved with the same ornament as the ceiling, and often gilded. The earliest example in the V&A is the settee designed by James “Athenian” Stuart and carved by Thomas Vardy in 1759–65 for the Painted Room at Spencer House, a limewood frame on eight legs with winged lions forming the legs and arm supports; Stuart, one of the first British architects to work in the new style, took the idea from Greek and Roman stone thrones. Robert Adam went further. For the drawing room at Kedleston Hall he designed a pair of sofas, made by John Linnell and delivered in July 1765, three metres twenty long, their giltwood legs formed as tritons and sea-nymphs among dolphins, the seats, backs and arms in flowered blue silk brocade with five loose bolsters to each sofa.

For Sir Lawrence Dundas at 19 Arlington Street, Adam drew in 1764 a set of “sopha chairs for the salon” that Thomas Chippendale then made — the only known case of Chippendale executing an Adam design. Chippendale’s bill for the eight armchairs, at £20 each, is the best short description of a fashionable seat of the 1760s: “exceeding richly carved in the Antick manner and gilt in oil Gold stuff’d and cover’d with your own damask and strong Castors on the feet”. The client supplied the silk; the maker supplied frame, stuffing and castors; four sofas completed the set. The National Trust’s houses show the style spreading — giltwood seat furniture attributed to Chippendale in the Saloon at Saltram, paid for in 1771–72, and at Petworth a partitioned giltwood sofa with a serpentine back and two corner seats, probably of 1777–79. By the 1790s the taste had lightened: Gillow & Co’s mahogany armchair of about 1787–95 in the V&A has an open heart-shaped back, tapering legs and a seat in horsehair cloth, while the Museum of the Home’s parlour of 1790 is still a room of wooden chairs and a folding card table.

What is a Grecian couch, and what makes a sofa “Regency”?

A Grecian couch is a single-ended reclining sofa with one high scrolled end, a lower foot, and a back that often runs only part of the way along — the Regency’s reinterpretation of the ancient kline, arriving in England around 1800. The V&A’s example was made by Gillow & Co in London in 1805 for the drawing room at Kinmel Park in Denbighshire, part of a suite of couches, armchairs and sofas for the Reverend Edward Hughes. It is carved and gilded beech, two metres long, with Egyptian-style lion terminals carved with lotus leaf, paw feet, a curved rest, a long squab cushion and a bolster at the head — animal legs, bolster and low scrolled foot being what the museum calls the Classical taste of the early nineteenth century.

The taste had a manifesto. Thomas Hope (1769–1831), a Dutch-born collector, bought Robert Adam’s house in Duchess Street in 1799, remodelled it with themed interiors drawn from Greece, Rome and Egypt, opened it to society in 1802, and in 1807 published Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, which the V&A credits with bringing the phrase “interior decoration” into English. The lighter end of the style was already in the shops: the V&A’s “Trafalgar” chair of about 1810, ebonised with a rope-twist back rail, has the continuous curve from back to sabre leg that the museum calls Grecian, from a design published in 1808.

The Regency sofa proper — the piece most people picture — is the double-ended form with scrolled arms of equal height, a straight or slightly curved back, sabre or turned legs and brass castors. The sofa in the South Drawing Room at Sir John Soane’s Museum is the domestic version: mahogany, scroll arms banded diagonally halfway down, squat legs on brass castors, two tasselled cushions. The museum’s inventory describes the room’s original sofa as having a “stuffed back and ends, hair cushion and two pillows, the whole with chintz covers”. At the top of society the same form was gilded: for George IV’s private apartments at Windsor Castle, Morel & Seddon made a suite of fifty-six pieces, twelve sofas among them, in carved and gilt mahogany with lion-paw front feet and sabre back legs, covered in blue, green or crimson silk damask. One Windsor sofa in the Royal Collection has outscrolled arms carved with lotus leaves — the arm every later “scroll-arm” sofa descends from.

Two smaller objects record what these sofas were made of. A chair squab supplied by Morel and Hughes to Northumberland House in 1823 — “a seat cushion to each of horsehair in canvas” — is black and white horsehair in a linen case, its border joined to the panels with very fine over-stitching, a row of top stitching along the edge and three rows of running stitch below, the creases of a tufting pattern still visible; its cover was grey silk striped with rosettes. And at Stourhead, Thomas Chippendale the younger’s invoice of May 1805 for eight mahogany and cane library chairs adds cushions “covered with fine Athenian red cloth” and one “covered with yellow leather”. Striped silk in the drawing room, leather in the library: the Regency division of coverings was settled.

By the end of the period the sofa had reached the middle of society. The Museum of the Home’s drawing room of 1830 is built around a sofa of about 1820 in blue upholstery on tapered legs with curved arms, and the museum states that sofas became common in homes in the early 1800s and were much more comfortable than earlier seating as the living space grew more informal. The mother reads fashion magazines on it while her daughters paint and write letters — the sofa being used, at last, as one is used today.

How was a Georgian sofa upholstered?

A Georgian sofa was “stuffed over”: the upholsterer built the seat directly on the frame rather than dropping in a separate cushion. The Roberts chair of 1732 and the Northumberland squab of 1823 between them supply the recipe. Linen webbing was tacked across the beech seat rails; a linen base cloth went over it; horsehair was teased and laid on the cloth; a linen stuffing cover was tacked over the hair and the whole stitched through with twine to stop the hair migrating. The stitching along the edge, which pulls the hair into a firm rolled lip and gives the seat its square front, is what upholsterers still call a hair-stitched edge; the trade name “French edge” for the more elaborate version is a later usage not traced here to a museum record. Over the linen went the show cover — velvet, damask, brocade, horsehair cloth or leather — nailed round the rails, the nail heads hidden under braid or displayed as a row of brass domes, with loose hair or feather cushions and bolsters on top. The frame was show-wood, meant to be seen: walnut on beech rails to about 1740, gilt beech or limewood for state suites, mahogany from mid-century, painted or gilded beech in the Regency, and castors underneath, which Chippendale charged for in 1765 and which Soane’s sofa still runs on.

Materials: what went where, and why

Leather or fabric?

The room decided it. In the drawing room and the state apartment the cover was silk — velvet at Houghton, brocade at Glemham and Kedleston, damask at Arlington Street and Windsor — often bought by the client and handed to the upholsterer, as Dundas did. Silk was the expensive part of the piece and was protected with loose covers; the Soane inventory’s “the whole with chintz covers” shows a sofa spending most of its life in its slip cover. Striped silks with small repeats, like the grey silk with rosettes at Northumberland House, suited the Regency’s flat surfaces. Horsehair cloth — glossy, cool and almost indestructible — covered dining and library chairs from the 1790s, and the Soane sofa was in black horsehair until 1984. Leather was the library material: the yellow-leather cushion in Chippendale the younger’s Stourhead bill sat among red cloth ones because its chair would be used hard, and the pattern held for a century. The canvaswork and Turkey-work covers of the early period faded from fashion as the century went on; needlework belonged to the walnut age, and the mahogany or giltwood sofa wanted the plain shine of silk.

What survives in a sofa made today

Six ideas from the Georgian and Regency century are still in production. The comparisons below pair each with a piece made in England today; they are there to make the lineage visible, not to suggest the modern pieces are reproductions — not least because every modern piece is sprung, and none of the originals was.