Side chair (voyeuse) 1780 - 1790

This voyeuse, or side chair, was made in France by Sulpice Brizard in the eighteenth century. The name voyeuse means ‘to view’ or ‘to watch,’ and these chairs were especially designed for people to sit on backwards, perched atop the seat and resting their arms on the upholstered top rail. The design reveals a society obsessed with observation, in an age of theater, opera, and the popular salon. Furniture design in eighteenth-century France was tied to complex social rituals. It reflected the rigid hierarchies of the time, with specific designs for people of different rank. This chair suggests the centrality of the spectacle in French high society, and even implies a certain theatricality to the act of observing. As historians, we use documents such as inventories, design drawings, and tax records to understand the status and the production of objects like this. By researching such resources, we can recover the social world of the French aristocracy.