A History of the Windsor Style
By Charles Santore
When Roger Sherman, a Connecticut cobbler, a statesman, and the only man of his time to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Association, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of the United States; sat for his portrait by Ralph Earl, he chose a Philadelphia low-back Windsor chair in which to be seated.
When the First Continental Congress met at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, Windsor armchairs furnished the room for that historic occasion.
In Robert Edge Pine’s well-known painting, The Congress Voting Independence, July 4, 1776, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll, and others can be seen seated in sack-back Windsor chairs.
In 1796, George Washington purchased from Philadelphia Windsor-chair makers Robert and Gilbert Gaw twenty-seven bow-back Windsor side chairs for use on the portico of his Mount Vernon home. John Adams had a favorite Windsor chair. And Thomas Jefferson is said to have composed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence while sitting in an unusual swivel Windsor chair, a Philadelphia type of the 1770s.
Windsor furniture is, I believe, the most characteristically American and the most historically significant type to emerge from eighteenth-century America. It is a democratic style, one which appealed to and was used by all levels of American society. Windsor furniture was practical indoors or out, in public buildings or in private residences, in the country or in the city. It accommodated children or adults. Furthermore, the Windsor style was adapted to a wider variety of furniture forms. Chairs, settees, tables, stands, stools, cradles--all lent themselves to adaptations in the Windsor style.
Indeed, the changing status and attitudes of the Colonial craftsman vis-a-vis England in the mid-eighteenth century are so eloquently revealed in American Windsor furniture – particularly the chairs—that by the time the Revolution had begun, the American Windsor chair had become established as the single most popular form of furniture ever to be made in America.
The term Windsor refers to a specific form of furniture, which has also been called stick furniture because of the method of its construction. A sold plank wooden seat, about two inches thick, is the keystone of the Windsor chair. Spindles are socketed into this seat to form the back of the chair. Similarly, to form the undercarriage of the chair, the legs are socketed into the bottom of the seat. Thus, unlike those of most other forms of chair, the rear legs of Windsors are not extensions of the back posts; neither are the front legs extensions of the arm supports, if the latter are present. It is in these elements, extending up and down from, and socketed into, a central hub (the seat), held in place with a steam-bent hoop, arm rail, or crest rail, that one can sense a psychology of construction more closely associated with wheel-wrights than with joiners, the makers of more traditional furniture constructed with mortise-and-tendon joints. In addition, the use of steam-bending itself to form furniture seems to have been a new idea.
William Macpherson Hornor, Jr., has said that, “in tracing chairmakers, it is obvious that the cabinet makers drifted into the construction of the finer chairs through their similarity to tables and other standing pieces of furniture which they were fabricating at the time. On the other hand, rushbottom chairs, together with Windsors, were primarily the work of turners.”
Now, in a sense Horner is quite correct. We know, for example, that Windsor-chair makers (like many cabinetmakers) depended on the services of turners, and many were themselves trained as turners. But in the eighteenth century the product of the turner was part of a very long tradition of furniture making, whereas the product of the Windsor-chair maker was anything but. Turners, for example, made joined tables, banisterback
chairs, joined stools, and more-- all of which in one way or another required precisely the same knowledge of joinery as that needed in the “finer” cabriole-leg Queen Anne tables and chairs. However, Windsor chairs are based on a different -I am tempted to say radically different—construction method and design psychology. And so, although Windsor chairs may have been made by turners, the development of the Windsor form itself in no way depends on the construction methods that turners traditionally used.
How and where did the Windsor chair originate? That question is often answered with a story, paroted time and again in one variation or another in books, magazine and encyclopaedia articles, lectures, and conversation among collectors and dealers. The story is that George II of England--or George I or George III -- was on a fox hunt or on a picnic when it began to rain and the monarch sought shelter in the simple home of one of his simple subjects, where, near the blazing hearth, he came upon a simple chair.
This chair had a seat made from a single plank of wood; the legs were attached to the seat through holes drilled into it. The back of the chair consisted of spokelike sticks that, were stuck into holes in the seat, too. So enthralled was the king that, on his return to Windsor Castle, he ordered several made after the same pattern. Hence, of course, the legendary derivation of both the chair and the name of the chair.
Today, although the story is still repeated, it is often dismissed as only legend. Originally appeared in Chester County Day Newspaper, 1985 edition.