“I’m not re-creating anything new about the chair,” Billeci says. The thin bow and long spindles must be tough and flexible oak, ash, and hickory are common choices. The seat is made of a comfortable wood that is soft enough to accept faceted tenons-such as pine or poplar. The undercarriage, arms, stumps, and short spindles have to withstand stress while holding the crisp details from their turning maple and yellow birch work perfectly. This is how Windsor chairs were meant to move, and Billeci’s chair, made from maple, pine, and oak, was a fabulous illustration.Īs different portions of the chairs must accomplish different tasks, chairmakers make use of the characteristics of a selection of woods. It is difficult to express the elasticity of these chairs, which can contort like a bendy straw, only to spring back the moment pressure is removed. To understand how a newly made green wood chair moves, we sought out Tivoli, New York–based chairmaker Michael Billeci, who makes traditional Windsor chairs by hand. What we often fail to see in Windsor chairs is the inimitable dynamism of their materials.
This black-painted Windsor armchair, possibly early nineteenth-century American, was sold at Stair Galleries on March 11, 2017, for $400. The bow backs Washington selected were the simplest of the lot with a single arched back and no arms. The fan back does away with the arm rail altogether. Rod backs, or birdcage Windsors, stand out with simple, bamboo-style turnings or even painted lines to mimic where turnings would have been. The comb back is believed to be the earliest design to have been made in the Americas and features spindles that run through a steam-bent arm rail, reaching upward in a way that can appear skeletal. Chairs in the sack-back style, typified by a curved steam-bent crest rail, were produced in large numbers in Philadelphia and were tremendously popular by the time Washington placed his order. When Washington ordered “24 ovel Back Chairs” (more commonly known as bow-back Windsors) from Gilbert and Robert Gaw of Philadelphia in 1796, the menu of options was already vast. The chair’s popularity was helped along by the variety of styles that were available by the later eighteenth century.
George Washington had thirty of them on the piazza at Mount Vernon.įan-back Windsor side chair by Sampson Barnett (active c. In 1774 the Continental Congress sat on Windsor chairs. In the colonies, the popularity of the chairs grew exponentially, and they were set beside kitchen hearths, filled taverns, and lined meeting rooms. The style’s leap across the Atlantic was chronicled in the postmortem inventory of the property of lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania Patrick Gordon in 1736, which included five Windsor chairs. By the early eighteenth century, however, English makers were building enough of them for examples to survive to this day. Claims that the Windsor chair was widely produced before the year 1700 are unsupported by evidence. The solid wood seat of these proto-Windsor chairs was pierced by “sticks” to form the legs and back, a method of construction different from that used for the mortise-and-tenon chairs made in England through the sixteenth century. The height of the comb back and the unrefined turnings of this English oak Windsor armchair suggest it dates c. Another version speculates that the chair came from the shops of innovative wheelwrights who, finding themselves with a stockpile of carriage-wheel spindles, designed a chair to make use of them. So impressed was he by the humble seat that he commanded that several be made for Windsor Castle. There, the king encountered a simple stick chair with a carved wooden seat. The story goes that one of the first Georges-which is not specified-was out on a country jaunt when inclement weather forced him to seek shelter in a peasant’s home. One version attempts to connect the chair’s origins to the Georgian royals. Despite the ubiquity of the form, the history of the Windsor chair is muddled by folklore and specious theory. It’s been said that half of all wooden chairs on the planet are either Windsors or are directly descended from the style. Different woods are used for different parts, and, once assembled, the chair is painted to hide the contrasting grains.
The legs splay outward and run into the seat, but do not become part of the seat’s back.
The spindles are carved, later turned, and run through the seat and into the crest rail or bow. The seat is made from a single piece of wood that is shaped to cradle the sitter gently. The Windsor chair is, in theory, quite simple. Photograph courtesy of Stair Galleries, Hudson, New York. This English elm and yew wood sack-back Windsor armchair, 1760–1800, was sold at Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York, for $300 on April 6, 2013.