Today we will explore the significance of the hall stand as a piece of furniture in middle class homes during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Hall stands, like many other culturally significant pieces of furniture of the era, embodied the standing and affluence of the household. In middle class households, where the expression of up to date fashion and luxury was paramount, hall stands held an important place for the ultimate fashion innovation-the umbrella.
Widely criticized for his inclusion of umbrellas in his ‘Paris Street, Rainy Day’ the millionaire gentleman artist Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894) included what many art aficianados and taste makers considered the ultimate sign of modern vulgarity-the ubiquitious black umbrella carried by the middling to avoid getting wet. The poor would have simply taken shelter or accepted their rainy fate, but the middle classes used bad weather as a foil to show thier modern and up to the minute embrace of new technologies and fashions.
When they returned home, their wet accessory would have been shaken at the door and then placed in an umbrella urn or a hallstand equipped with an area to hold umbrellas.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a revival in Chinoiserie, and the Japanese prints of the Hokkaido Road influended artists like Manet, who included other works in the background of his own. Other artists, like Van Gogh, painted Japanese screens and household furniture as they saw it, in situ, in Continental, British, or American households.
This hall stand is made of charred bamboo, with distinctive brass hooks. The central panel depicts a Japonesque frieze of birds picked out in gilt on a red and black background. The shelf beneath it also reflects a bird motif, and the emtpy spaces on the sides were meant to hold walking sticks and umbrellas.
A visitor encountering this piece in the 1870s or 1880s would have known his host was fashionable, elite, and concerned with aesthetics and status. Households of lesser means would have had a more modest quarter sawn oak piece, while more elite households might have an elaborately carved, towering hall stand replete with marble or stretching up to the elevated ceiling and adorned with French Gothic motifs.
