Lately, I've been obsessed with a particular chair...it's so fabulous, it can easily stand alone. Its the KLISMOS!
A brief history from my favorite source, Wikipedia:
The klismos chair is a type of ancient Greek chair, familiar from depictions of ancient furniture on painted pottery and in bas-reliefs from the mid-fifth century BCE onwards.
The klismos was revived during the second, archaeological phase of European neoclassicism. Klismos chairs were first widely seen in Paris in the furniture made for the painter Jacques-Louis David by Georges Jacob in 1788, to be used as props in David's historical paintings, where the new sense of historicism required visual authenticity.
It would be hard to find a French klismos chair earlier than the ones designed by the architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu 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 included the tablet of an approximation of a klismos chair in hisPenelope Unraveling Her Web, 1783-84
In London, early klismos chairs were designed by Thomas Hope for his house in Duchess Street, London,[9] which George Beaumont 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
These days, one can find a number of reproductions of this classic piece! Below are some of my favorite versions:
Michael Taylor
Scala Luxury
If your pockets won't aren't deep enough to get these beauties, have no fear! West Elm makes a beautiful version!
West Elm
Style is available at any price point! So be sure to introduce this classic piece into your decor...I promise you will not regret it!
