The Late Georgian Designer Bed 1750-1805The Historic Design Influence on the Design History of the Classic Poster Beds

By 1740 most good-quality furniture was being made of mahogany and a style of furniture began to evolve which was English in character though influenced by the rococo styles of carved florid festoons, rockwork and garlands which originated in the France of Louis XV. The classic poster beds tester bed with tall slender posts had superseded the covered bed, with a richly carved mahogany headboard and foot posts often in cluster form, like church columns.

Designers began to have a greater influence as attitudes to furnishing the bed­room altered. Among their designs of furniture to suit the fashionable tastes of those who could afford them, they offered a wide range of classic poster beds, often in conjunction with other furnishings and sometimes taking into account an individual room. Towards the end of this period other types of bed, which had, mainly developed from the elaborate chaise-longue or day-bed, began to appear, such as canopied couches, sofa beds and the French bateau (boat) bed.

Thomas Chippendale (1718-79) was the first of a new generation of designee A cabinet-maker working in London, he published in 1754 the Gentleman and Cabinet-maker's Director containing designs for both ordinary and elaborate furniture. This was possibly the first time that such a book had been offered showing pieces that could be made even by the country craftsman and it had great influence. As well as rococo elements, Chippendale used popular Chinese features. The fine chinoiserie classic poster bed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, originally thought to be by Chippendale, is now attributed to William Linnell. This is decorated with a pagoda-shaped canopy and a gilt dragon on each corner post. The Director includes a `Chinese sopha' with pagoda canopy and decoration and other items that were `Chinese or in Chinese taste'. Chippendale's two `Gothic beds' incorporate tracery work,' Gothic cusping and cluster columns and reflect the increasing interest in medieval styles.

Some of the finest work from Chippen­dale's own workshop was made to the refined classical poster beds designs of Robert Adam (1728-92), the architect and designer who led the classical movement based on Roman and Italian models which displaced rococo. Classical outlines appeared light and delicate, with tapering columns and balanced curves, and Adam created a simple elegant style which influenced or was copied by other designers beyond the end of the eighteenth century and ultimately affected every field of the creative arts.

Adam's designs gained an even wider public through George Hepplewhitc (died 1786), who is known mainly because of his illustrations in his book The Cabinet-maker's and Upholsterer's Guide, first published by his widow in 1788. At about the same time (1791-4) Thomas Sheraton published his Cabinet­maker's and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, which provides a comprehensive picture of good-quality furniture at the end of the eighteenth century.

The mahogany classic poster beds in use at the end of the eighteenth century reflects the designs of both Hepplewhitc and Sheraton. The foot posts had a vase-shaped swelling which was similar to the vase motif which appears in Robert Adam's designs, and this led to the reeded or fluted tapered post. The cornice, surmounting a painted and tabbed valance, was carved mahogany or had painted decoration. The draperies were described by Hepplewhite as plain or figured silk and satins with fringed velvet for state beds, printed cottons, plain or corded white dimity with a fringe of gimpthread known as `Manchester stuff' for other beds. If the valance was gathered fully, it was known as a petticoat valance. Printed cottons were produced after 1770 from incised copper plates which gave a fineness of detail. In 1796 the engraved roller was first introduced, and by this process a machine could print some 4000 yards (3700 metres) of material a day. Mechanical engraving was available in 1801, and all these inventions enabled cheaper cottons to be produced, bringing them within the curved lines and contours reintroduced by Hepplewhitc and, like Robert Adam, favoured the straight line. Sheraton looked back to Chippendale and commented that his designs `are now wholly antiquated and laid aside', adding that `time alters fashions'. His drawings for the furniture of the 1790s were plainer and lighter than earlier designs. Mahogany had largely given way to satinwood, which had been brought to England from India in about 1760. It was used in veneer form from about 1780, and it had a cool, light and pleasing effect. The classic poster bedsteads in Sheraton's Drawing Book appear more unusual than typical of the period and include the `alcove bed', the `summer bed in two compartments' and the `elliptic bed'. He seemed to admire the design which used a domed tester or cupola linked to elaborate draperies and valances which were festooned, braided and betasselled.

Regency And Victorian Beds 1805-90

The Regency period brought a change from the clean lines of the late Georgian classic poster beds style to the heavier, often over-decorated furniture of designers who led the way to the florid Victorian style. Draperies were necessary to give privacy, so in the early Regency the satins, silk damask and chintz materials were still in use. Later, lighter materials were popular. John C. Loudon in 1833 commented that chintz was preferred for bed curtains as `it admits of being washed' and dimity, a light cotton fabric, was used because cur­tains made of this `keep long clean'. classic poster beds tent beds were still in use and they changed their form little during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The classic four-poster bed, and to some extent the tent bed, were increasingly replaced by the French bateau bed, which was similar to a Grecian sofa. A pole projected from the wall behind the couch at a height of 10 feet (3 metres), and the draperies were hung over it. The couch or sofa was often boat-shaped with scrolled-over ends, made of mahogany and enriched with brass ornament in classical taste. One of the first design books to have an impact at this time was Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration by George Smith, published in 1808. It included an array of four-posters, half-testers and French beds, often with extravagant draperies. The military bed had its curtain hanging from crossed swords. The state bed, which now found its place in the main bedroom of most country houses, appears here within a stone Gothic arch using pinnacles for bedposts, while the polonaise classic poster beds bed with its central dome and carefully arranged hangings bears a strong resemblance to Sheraton's French bed of a decade ear­lier. The footboard, which was framed between the foot posts of the bed, came into use about 1810 and remained an integral part of the bed, in its many forms, until after the Second World War, when the divan bed made its appearance.

Smith's ideas of the Gothic were pushed further by Augustus Pugin, whose Gothic Furniture in the Style of the Fifteenth Century (1835) re-created the elaborate woodwork of Perpendicular architecture in what he termed his `florid style'. Much simpler were the beds recommended in Loudon's Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture (first edition 1833), which dealt with designs more suitable for the middle classes. Loudon felt that the idea of metal bedsteads `would shock those who have always been accustomed to consider mahogany essential'. But it seems that before the Great Exhibition of 1851 only some four hundred brass beds were made a week, while after they had been exhibited there more than five thousand a week were manufactured.

By 1851 the use of the fully curtained bed had declined to such an extent that a writer in 1877 commented: `now that the venerable classic four-post bedstead is generally discarded, the mahogany half-tester has taken its place'. The pages of Loudon's Encyclopedia include quite a number of classic poster half-testers beds, both of wood and of metal, but it is in the design books or cataloguers of designers and manufacturers such as Thomas King (1839) and William Smee and Sons (1850) and in Blackie's Cabinetmaker's Assistant (1859) that we see their increasing popularity. Later, with Richard Charles (1866-8), the elaborate half-tester in eighteenth-century style reappears, while the designs of G. W. Yapp (1876) show an elaboration which almost exceeds the extravagances of the Stuart state beds. The half-tester continued through designs by G. Maddox (1882), an Adam reconstruction by James Shoolbred and Company (1889) and the Army and Navy catalogue (1880) almost into the twentieth century. Occasionally a designer attempted to direct fashion, such as Charles Eastlake in 1878 with his iron half-tester bedsteads painted in Venetian red, chocolate or sage green, with striped masculine hangings suspended on projecting spears. A patent of 1842 enabled metal and wood to be covered with japanned papier-mache, thus allowing classic poster beds such as half-testers to be made of this material.

By 1875 the metal bedstead was in general use, and some six thousand brass bedsteads a week were made in Birmingham. The use of metal was advised on health grounds, and, as many were still produced to carry draperies, the bed posts and tester frames could be thinner and lighter in appearance. The mattress was supported on stout metal laths which replaced the wooden laths and corded lacing by 1850. The spring mattress became available in 1855, and the tension wire mattress by 1890.