Bow-back Windsor Side Chair
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$275.00
$275.00
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This New York style bow-back Windsor stands 6 7/8" (17.5cm) high. The seat is made of pine, the bow of red oak, and the legs, rungs and spindles are of maple. The original would have been made between 1785 and 1790.
Some of the features now associated with Windsor furniture can be seen in rustic hand-hewn low stools of Egypt, 3500 years ago. They typically had three or four stumpy legs socketed into a thick flat or dished plank seat.
Illustrations from the beginning of the Roman Empire, 27BC, and the European Middle Ages show similar stools in use. By the early 16th century, stools were beginning to be fitted with backs of a few short sticks socketed to the back edge of the seat and capped with a horizontal board. 1
Windsors, as we know them today, began to develop in the early 18th century in England with production centered in and around London.
These chairs were not confined to England for long. They had crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia before 1736, when the will of Patrick Gordon, Governor of Pennsylvania, included mention of Windsor chairs. It is thought that production of Windsor chairs did not begin in Philadelphia until around 1740. 2
The bow-backed Windsor, in 1780s Philadelphia, incorporated a newly styled support structure; the legs and stretchers were turned to simulate bamboo, based on an Oriental design from a book of designs in the Chinese taste by Sir William Chambers in 1757. 3,4
From the mid-1780s through the 1790s, New York makers, rather than imitate the Philadelphia product created bow-backs with their own extraordinarily fine versions of the earlier vase-and-ring pattern. 5
Michael Dunbar bought the model for this side chair in an antique shop in Southern Maine, but the chair was probably made in New York City. 6
This is the chair presented here.
1. The Book of American Windsor Furniture: Styles and Technologies - John Kassay, 1998, page 1.
2. Windsor Chairmaking - James Mursell, 2015, page 17.
3 and 5. The Windsor Style in America, Volume 2 - Charles Santore, 1981, page 118.
4. Design sources for Windsor Furniture, part 1: The eighteenth Century - Nancy Goyne Evans, The Magazine Antiques, January 1988, page 281.
6. Make a Windsor Side Chair - Michael Dunbar, American Woodworker #24, January/ February 1992.
Illustrations from the beginning of the Roman Empire, 27BC, and the European Middle Ages show similar stools in use. By the early 16th century, stools were beginning to be fitted with backs of a few short sticks socketed to the back edge of the seat and capped with a horizontal board. 1
Windsors, as we know them today, began to develop in the early 18th century in England with production centered in and around London.
These chairs were not confined to England for long. They had crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia before 1736, when the will of Patrick Gordon, Governor of Pennsylvania, included mention of Windsor chairs. It is thought that production of Windsor chairs did not begin in Philadelphia until around 1740. 2
The bow-backed Windsor, in 1780s Philadelphia, incorporated a newly styled support structure; the legs and stretchers were turned to simulate bamboo, based on an Oriental design from a book of designs in the Chinese taste by Sir William Chambers in 1757. 3,4
From the mid-1780s through the 1790s, New York makers, rather than imitate the Philadelphia product created bow-backs with their own extraordinarily fine versions of the earlier vase-and-ring pattern. 5
Michael Dunbar bought the model for this side chair in an antique shop in Southern Maine, but the chair was probably made in New York City. 6
This is the chair presented here.
1. The Book of American Windsor Furniture: Styles and Technologies - John Kassay, 1998, page 1.
2. Windsor Chairmaking - James Mursell, 2015, page 17.
3 and 5. The Windsor Style in America, Volume 2 - Charles Santore, 1981, page 118.
4. Design sources for Windsor Furniture, part 1: The eighteenth Century - Nancy Goyne Evans, The Magazine Antiques, January 1988, page 281.
6. Make a Windsor Side Chair - Michael Dunbar, American Woodworker #24, January/ February 1992.