CHAPTER VIII
THE WINDSOR
CHAIR
CHAPTER VIII
THE WINDSOR CHAIR
Early types—The stick legs without stretcher—The tavern chair—Eighteenth-century pleasure gardens—The rail-back variety—Chippendale style Windsor chairs—The survival of the Windsor chair.
The Windsor chair in its early form is coincident with the early years of the eighteenth century. Its history and development therefore exhibit traces of the various styles in furniture which ran their courses throughout the century. It is essentially a chair which belongs to minor furniture, and in its use it is bound up with the country farmhouse, the country inn, or in the metropolis with the chocolate-houses and taverns, and later with the innumerable pleasure gardens which sprang up around the metropolis in the eighteenth century.
There is more than a strong suggestion that the type originated in the country. The first forms have a similarity to the easily made three-legged stools. The seat is one piece of wood into which holes are bored to admit the legs. The origin of the term "Windsor chair," according to a story largely current in America, is that George III., the Farmer King, saw a chair of this design in a humble cottage near Windsor, and was so enamoured of it that he ordered some to be made for the royal use. The chair had a singular vogue in America, and it is stated that George Washington had a row of Windsor chairs at his house at Mount Vernon, and Jefferson sat in a Windsor chair when he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The Stick Legs without Stretcher.—Obviously this is the earliest type, and the illustrations of these primitive forms (p. [247]) show the simplicity of the joinery. The chair on the left with its almost straight top rail suggests a probable date. It was not till 1768 that Chippendale made the first straight top rail in English furniture. The seat is of the saddle-form. The spindles at the back in the lower row taper at each end. It will be observed in all the types we illustrate in this chapter that the arms extend in one piece around the chair. Nor has every example the saddle seat. On the same page is illustrated one with a plain seat, but still having the stick legs set at an angle towards the centre of the chair.
Whatever interest attaches to this early type, from a collecting point of view, they cannot compare in beauty with the finer varieties of a later period, with cabriole leg and with pierced splat, displaying a pleasing diversity of patterns in pierced work, no two of which are always quite alike.