The impressive main room at Mount Vernon rises the full two-story height of the house. Decorated in the Adamesque style, this salon was used for socializing, receptions, and dancing, and also functioned as a banqueting room—when a temporary table was set up on trestles. The room contained two dozen Sheraton-style mahogany side chairs as well as two grand sideboards, all made by John Aitken, a Scottish-born Philadelphia cabinetmaker. The chairs in the adjacent parlor were Chippendale-style mahogany cabriole side chairs, similar to the ones that Thomas Burling, a New York cabinetmaker, had supplied for Washington’s official residence when the federal capital was in New York City. Burling made the side chairs in the family dining room.
Washington’s study contained a mahogany dressing table that he had bought from de Moustier, and a handsome tambour secretary made by Aitken. At the secretary stood an upholstered barrel-back swivel chair. Washington recorded that he paid Burling seven pounds for the “Uncomn Chr..” Such swivel chairs were indeed uncommon in America though not, as we have seen, in France—perhaps Washington came across one in de Moustier’s study. A month later, not to be outdone, Jefferson ordered his own swivel chair, the infamous “whirlgig chair,” with a taller back and bright red leather upholstery (Washington’s chair was black). Jefferson also added two “candle arms,” so that when he swiveled, light would follow. Different men, different chairs.
The Stick Chair
Washington had another unusual chair in his study. The chair at his writing desk was fitted with an overhead pasteboard fan that swung back and forth like an Indian punkah, the power being supplied by the sitter using a foot treadle. The inventor of the “Fan Chair” was John Cram, a Philadelphia musical instrument maker, who had built the first one in 1786 for the artist Charles Willson Peale and later made one for Benjamin Franklin. Cram built the support frame and the treadle mechanism; the chair itself was an ordinary Windsor, the most common chair of that time.
The Windsor chair is an English invention. The key to its ingenious design is the seat, a thick slab of solid hardwood, carved with two shallow, saddle-shaped depressions to provide sitting comfort. The back hoop is a single piece of wood, steam-heated and bent into shape. The hoop is simply countersunk into the seat, as are the turned spindles and splayed legs—no complicated joinery or hardware is required. Although there are rare examples of mahogany chairs, English Windsors were generally made of a combination of commonplace woods: hard elm for the seat, dense beech for the turnings, and malleable ash or yew for the hoop. Windsor chairs were inexpensive—an unpainted chair sold for a few shillings, compared with more than a pound for a Chippendale-style mahogany side chair. They were used in taverns and public houses, and in the homes of ordinary country people; in wealthier households they served as outdoor furniture.
The Windsor chair originated in the late seventeenth century in Buckinghamshire, whose extensive beechwood forests provided a ready supply of material for the turnings. There is a charming story that George II came across the chair while sheltering from the rain in a cottage and found it so comfortable that he ordered several for Windsor Castle, which gave the chair its name. Unfortunately, it is only a story, because there are textual references to “Windsor chairs” years before George II assumed the throne. The name more likely derived either from Windsor Great Forest, whence much of the wood originated, or from the market town of Windsor, which was a clearinghouse for the chairs on their way to London.
Windsor chairs were produced by a cottage industry. Bolgers, who lived in the forest, used pedal-operated pole-lathes to turn the spindles, legs, and stretchers. Bottomers carved the seats, benchmen produced the splats and sawn parts, while polishers smoothed the rough pieces with spokeshaves and sandpaper. Framers assembled the parts, and stainers finished the chair, typically black or green. None of these techniques were particularly novel; they were adapted from the wheelwright’s craft, which traditionally steam-bent wood for wheel rims, used lathe-turned spindles for spokes, and drilled holes for socket joints.
English hoop-back Windsor chair
There were two basic types of Windsor chairs: the hoop-back, in which a steam-bent hoop supported the spindles, and the comb-back, in which the spindles themselves supported a carved crest rail. There were many permutations: with arms, with splats, with V-shaped back braces, with a low or a high back, and with straight, turned, or cabriole legs. What all these chairs had in common was that they were light, strong, and comfortable.
The Windsor chair arrived in America very early. Patrick Gordon, who was deputy governor of the Province of Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties on the Delaware, brought five comb-back Windsor chairs with him when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1726. This plain chair must have appealed to the frugal Quakers, for there were soon scores of Windsor chairmakers in the city. The most popular model was the hoop-back, known locally as a sack-back. These so-called Philadelphia chairs were exported to other colonies up and down the eastern seaboard and as far south as the West Indies. It is easy to understand the Windsor chair’s appeal: it did not use fancy woods; it did not require wood-carving or upholstering skills; unlike a rush chair the seat never had to be replaced; and an old chair needed only a coat of paint to freshen it up. By mid-century, the Windsor chair was the most popular chair in the colonies. Windsor chairs furnished Philadelphia’s Carpenters Hall, where the First Continental Congress met, and the State House, where the Founding Fathers gathered to sign the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.1
American Windsor chairs were not produced by a rural cottage industry but in cities, and although some of the production approached the organization of an assembly line, the best were made by individual craftsmen, such as Francis Trumble, Joseph Henzey, and Thomas Gilpin, all of Philadelphia. Some of these men started as cabinetmakers, others specialized in Windsor chairs, and all were skilled craftsmen (often signing their chairs). American makers of Windsor chairs did not—in fact, could not—copy English models, for this humble chair was not included in pattern books. Consequently, they were free to exercise their own ingenuity, and in the process produced chairs that reached a higher level of refinement than their English counterparts. Splats and cabriole legs were done away with, and spindles were made progressively thinner. Comb-backs were given interesting scrolls, and the ends of arms were often carved with knuckles resembling animal paws. Some makers combined the sack-back and the comb-back to make an especially tall chair with a headrest. The lightest, most delicate model was the fan-back armchair, whose tall sloping back was reinforced by two diagonal braces. The prices of these chairs varied: a plain sack-back might cost only a few shillings, whereas a respected maker could demand as much as fifteen shillings.
After mid-century, Windsor chair manufacturing spread to New York and New England. Ebenezer Stone, a Boston maker of “Warranted Green Windsor Chairs,” advertised that his chairs were “painted equally as well as those made in Philadelphia.” Chairmakers in New York City developed a particularly elegant design in which the hoop-back and the arms were made out of one continuous steam-bent piece of hickory or ash. Because elm was rare, American makers generally used poplar or pine for the seat, and maple for the spindles. As in England, Windsor chairs were either stained or painted—green was popular, so were red and black.
There is nothing rustic about American Windsor chairs, which were as likely to furnish a grand house as a roadside tavern. Jefferson owned more than twenty of them. What he called “stick chairs” stood in the entrance hall of Monticello and were moved around the house as required. He also owned an unusual revolving Windsor chair, in which he is said to have written the Declaration of Independence. Revolving Windsor chairs did not become common until the 1840s, so it is likely that Jefferson himself designed this chair. Washington, too, owned many Windsor chairs. He bought two dozen oval-back Windsor side chairs with fashionable “bamboo” legs from a Philadelphia maker, and placed them on the porch at Mount Vernon; he had the Windsor fan chair in his study, a Windsor arm
chair in his bedroom, and a Windsor high chair for his grandchildren. The most unusual of Washington’s Windsors was his “riding chair,” a cannibalized Windsor chair seat bolted to the frame of a two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy.
Continuous-arm Windsor chair with bamboo legs
The American Windsor chair had many specialized offspring. Windsor settees ranged in length from four to twelve feet. Windsor writing-arm chairs had one arm broadened into an oval writing surface. In some versions, the writing arm had a drawer for paper, pens, and ink; the sewing Windsor had a drawer under the seat. The smoker’s bow was a stocky chair with wide arms on which a pipe smoker could rest his elbow. The captain’s chair was another low-back Windsor chair, as was the firehouse Windsor. Stools, with three or four legs, were available in a variety of heights. Perhaps the humblest Windsor chair was the stick-back kitchen chair, similar to my flea-market side chairs. Here the design was reduced to its plainest and most utilitarian essentials: a solid shaped seat, a simple comb-back, turned legs and spindles.
When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania two decades ago, my office was unfurnished, and I was asked what kind of chairs I would like. I chose Windsor chairs—a sack-back armchair for myself, and a bow-back side chair for visitors. The seat was pine, the turned pieces maple, and the bow-back ash. The Warren Chair Works of Warren, Rhode Island, which made my chairs, uses programmed lathes and electrical-powered cutting and drilling machines, instead of pole lathes, pit saws, and carpenter’s braces, but the design of my armchair is virtually identical to the sack-back that Benjamin Franklin occupies in Robert Edge Pine’s eighteenth-century painting Congress Voting Independence.
Windsor chairs have been mass-produced since the nineteenth century, and although purists might consider the handmade versions superior, the design of the Windsor chair proved remarkably durable and unlike many handcrafted artifacts it survived industrialization intact. The explanation is simple. “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness,” observed Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He was describing an airplane, but his observation applies equally to a Windsor chair. Everything extraneous has been removed; no matter how it is fabricated—in a workshop or in a factory—the result is the same. A Windsor chair is not made of fine woods, and it doesn’t need to be decorated; its appeal is entirely a function of its proportions and its air of lightness and grace.
Wooden Narcotics
If the Windsor chair could be said to be England’s national chair, the quintessential American chair is the rocking chair. Like the Windsor chair, the rocking chair originated as a vernacular product, that is, it was the work of anonymous chairmakers. Nothing could be simpler than adding two curved rockers to an ordinary chair; after all, cradles have had rockers since the Middle Ages. Then why did it take several centuries before someone did it to a chair? Part of the explanation may be the lack of a suitably light and inexpensive chair; medieval armchairs were too heavy, and backstools did not lend themselves to rocking. More important, the symbolic function of chairs precluded adding something as carefree as a rocking motion. It’s hard to imagine a cabriole chair or a fauteuil on rockers. For hundreds of years chairs were associated with stability and repose—a chair that rocked back and forth would have seemed undignified.
To a colonial settler living in the wilderness of North America and largely cut off from the conventions of the Old World, a chair that rocked might have appeared slightly less preposterous. Or at least worth trying. Benjamin Franklin owned a rocking chair but he was not its inventor. The earliest record of a rocking chair is a 1742 invoice written by Solomon Fussell, a Philadelphia cabinetmaker who charged six shillings for “one Nurse Chair with rockers.” Nurse chairs, which were common at that time, were low armless side chairs used by wet nurses and nursing mothers. We don’t know what Fussell’s rocking nurse chair looked like, but judging from the low price it must have been rather plain, probably with a ladder back and a rush bottom.
Infants are lulled to sleep by a gently rocking motion—whether in a mother’s arms or in a cradle—so a rocking nurse chair makes sense. Fussell, with a Quaker’s taste for simplicity, would certainly have appreciated the idea, but he cannot be credited with the invention. Shortly after he made the nurse chair, a “rocking chair” was listed in the estate of a deceased Chester County, Pennsylvania, resident, which suggests an earlier origin, probably sometime in the early 1700s.
Ladder-back, rush-bottom rocking chair
The first rocking chairs were used by nursing mothers, and were also considered suitable for the elderly and the infirm. However, as people realized that such chairs were an inexpensive alternative to upholstered easy chairs, their popularity grew, and by 1750, rush-bottom rocking chairs had spread from Pennsylvania to New England. Before the turn of the century, rockers were being attached to Windsor chairs. A Windsor rocker cost about twice as much as a rush-bottom rocker, but with its carved seat, ample width, and sloping back it was considerably more comfortable.
By the 1820s, rocking chairs had become a national fad; every American home had at least one. They were as likely to be found in the parlor as in the bedroom or kitchen. Or on the porch—porches facing the street were a distinctive feature of American houses, and rocking chairs were tailor-made for people-watching. One of the most popular rocking chairs was the Boston rocker, a comb-back Windsor chair with a tall back surmounted by a broad top rail that provided comfortable support for the head—and a convenient location for decoration, usually stenciled floral motifs. The spindles of the back were sometimes gently curved in an S shape, and the arms were generally heavy and ended in scrolls. Some Boston rockers had elaborate seats that curved down at the front and up at the rear.
Foreigners were struck—and amused—by the American habit of rocking back and forth. The writer Frances Trollope described women living in a Philadelphia boardinghouse: “As to what they do … it is not very easy to say; but I believe they clear-starch a little, and iron a little, and sit in a rocking-chair and sew a great deal.” Another nineteenth-century British visitor described the rocking chair as “of exclusive American contrivance and use,” and commented on the “comfort and luxurious ease of these wooden narcotics.” Philip Schaff, a Swiss theologian who spent most of his life in the United States, went further and considered the rocking chair to be a reflection of national character. “Even when seated, [Americans] push themselves to and fro in their rocking chairs,” he wrote in 1854; “they live in a state of perpetual excitement in their business, their politics, and their religion…”
Boston rocker
Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the 1830s, had nothing to say about rockers but he did record an insight that bears on chairs. Always on the lookout for differences between America and France, he pointed out that in aristocratic France an accomplished artisan could sell his skills to the elite at a high price, whereas in a democracy the mass market required vastly reduced prices. “But there are only two ways of lowering the price of commodities,” he wrote. “The first is to discover some better, shorter, and more ingenious method of producing them; the second is to manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar, but of less value.” Tocqueville was certainly correct about what drove the difference between a fauteuil à la reine and a sack-back Windsor chair, but reducing prices is not the only way to attract buyers in a mass market. Another is novelty. No sooner did the rocking chair become popular than chairmakers began offering unusual options: a rocking chair for invalids with a superstructure frame over which a protective blanket could be draped, turning it into an improvised wing chair; baby rockers for children and medium-size rockers for youths; settee rockers for two; a settee rocker with a fence insert that transformed the space next to the mother into a cradle. Samuel May of Sterling, Massachusetts, patented a rocker in which the seat and one arm slid sideways to make the chair wider,
and the removable headpiece was inserted into the front of the seat, converting the rocking chair into a baby’s cradle.
The line between chairmaker and chair inventor was often blurred. Samuel Gragg was an enterprising joiner who learned how to steam-bend wood while making continuous-arm Windsor chairs as an apprentice in New York City. After he opened his own furniture shop in Boston in 1801, he made Windsor chairs and rocking chairs with delicate S-shaped back splats (which would influence the design of Boston rockers). He also experimented with steam-bending, and in 1808 patented a chair made entirely out of extremely thin pieces of bent wood. It is a remarkable design: the front legs curve up to form the edge of the seat, and curve again to form the back support; the back splats and the seat are made of continuous pieces. He called it the Elastic Chair. Although a few dozen examples survive in museums today, the chair was not a commercial success. “The Elastic Chair was simply too labor and skill intensive to be financially successful,” Michael Podmaniczky, a Delaware chairmaker and restorer, who is an authority on Gragg, wrote to me in an e-mail. Podmaniczky has built several Elastic Chairs, both for exhibitions and for his own use, and I asked him what the delicate-looking chairs were like to sit in. “They are as comfortable as a solid wood chair can be. As for their strength, they are superior to most.” Is the chair really elastic? “No. It’s actually quite stiff,” he answered. “Gragg was thinking of the pliable wood after steaming when he named it.” As we shall see in the following chapter, it would be left to another inventor to perfect a chair made out of bentwood.
Elastic Chair (Samuel Gragg)
The rocking chair took many forms: Windsor chair, Boston rocker, rush-bottomed chair, rattan and wicker chair. Early in the nineteenth century, fully upholstered parlor rockers appeared, with tufted backs, padded armrests, and mahogany frames. It was in such a chair that President Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theatre.
Now I Sit Me Down Page 8
