Louis XIV-Style High-Back Leather Armchair in Carved Dark Wood with Scrolled Crest and Os de Mouton Stretcher

About this object

A high-back armchair in the Louis XIV manner — the chair of the late seventeenth century, when backs rose to frame the sitter like a portrait — built in carved dark hardwood and dressed in deep espresso leather. The back climbs well past a metre to a carved serpentine crest that breaks at each corner into bold ear-scrolls; the leather of back and seat is held by unbroken lines of brass nailheads; the arms scroll forward over shaped supports; and below, the legs take the form that names the era — os de mouton, "sheep's bone," the muscular double-curve of French Baroque legwork — braced by a carved, shaped stretcher. It is the armchair as architecture, from the century that invented the idea. Two trades meet at full strength here. The frame is carver's work throughout: the crest's ear-scrolls are shaped in the round, the apron is profiled and carved on its face, and os de mouton legs are the joiner's reef — compound curves that must mirror each other in two axes, then accept stretcher joints partway along a bend. The upholstery is the older, harder leather discipline: hide pulled drum-tight over a tall flat back where every ripple would show, edges turned and closed under hundreds of individually driven brass nails, spacing held to the millimetre over nearly five metres of perimeter. Leather, dark wood and brass — the trinity this style was born wearing. This chair has one job and does it completely: presiding. Behind a desk it is the study chair that ends the argument about who the room belongs to; beside a bar or fireplace, paired with a side table and a lamp, it makes a whisky corner with a single object; at the head of a long table — one, or a pair at both ends — it elevates every other chair in the room. The high back does practical work too, supporting the head for genuinely long sitting. Espresso leather deepens and burnishes with use; this is furniture that improves on its owner's schedule.