Bench

The bench is a piece of furniture, like no other, that we associate with the countryside and the ‘old days’ in a broad sense. Nowadays, its various variants can be found in many restaurants and bars aspiring to be ‘old Polish’ and regional establishments. It is less common to find it furnished in residential houses, especially in kitchens. A bench, understood as a board fixed to the wall or movable, supported by two or four legs, has accompanied people for a very long time. With time, it acquired an increasingly elegant appearance: carpentry and woodcarving decorations, paintings, sometimes a movable backrest, armrests, a built-in chest as a storage compartment, all this made the bench a comfortable and irreplaceable piece of furniture. Like most of the products of material culture, including those related to interior decoration, domestic furniture of the peasantry and the poorer bourgeoisie was modelled on the furniture of the upper classes. Various types of benches were known in the countryside already at the beginning of the 18th century. The presented bench is simple in its construction. It is made of a long, almost three-metre board of pine supported by three legs made of profiled boards. Each leg goes into a turned semi-column that supports the backrest decorated with a slat from below. The uprights and the backrest are connected decoratively with a palm motif, partly openwork and floral patterns, different for each column. The seat board is not painted. The other parts are dark blue, partly dark green, and the floral arrangements are red, yellow and white. The painting, ornamentation and careful artistry indicate that the bench was a standing piece of furniture probably in a relatively large room in the house, perhaps a room with a representative function.

Iwona Karwowska