Unstamped medium bow back Lincolnshire Windsor armchair, crook underarm supports, 6 long spindles, 2 x 4 underarm spindles, ring and cove front leg turnings with single lower ring & plain back legs, crinoline stretcher

WS 137 Lincolnshire Windsor bow back armchair

Well crafted and full of understated elegance - a typical early nineteenth century Lincolnshire windsor chair - but we do not know who made it. The outstanding feature of this chair is the quatrefoil motif in the splat; they are rarely seen. The seat and most of the components are made from ash, the splat probably from fruitwood. However the two steam bent bows are made from a wood that I am not familiar with and could even have been constructed from hazel. This chair is in the collection of Brian Gray.

I have made the bold statement that this is a Lincolnshire Windsor chair, even though it does not have a makers stamp on it to verify where it was made. I have been asked many times how I know if a chair was made in Lincolnshire and after giving some talks to groups of people this year my thoughts have focused on answering that question. The first reason I am so confident I am able to recognise them is that I have handled a significant number of signed chairs and a pattern emerges that is common to all Lincolnshire chairs. Always remember that the chairmaker has left his finger prints over every component, whether on purpose or not (these could be explicit or implicit features).

The first most obvious feature that can be spotted at some distance is the design of the legs, namely a ring and cove on the front legs (later to become just two rings) and plain back legs, tapered towards both ends. The lack of decoration on the back legs just typifies the frugal attitude these makers had to the manufacture of their chairs to remain competitive with other chairmakers. On the front leg the ring design tends to be small whereas the cove is flat and elongated (made with a gouge chisel rather than a nail chisel).

The next pointer I look for is the seat - I reckon that at least 85% of signed Lincolnshire chairs have seats made from the ash tree (the other 15% are made from elm). The early makers used flaired seats to get the front legs further apart and I have yet to see a Lincolnshire chair with the legs let right through seat (a common practice on Thames Valley chairs).

The design of the back splat holds no interest to me at all - I have not come across any association of the fretted design with the maker. However, it appears to me that all the Lincolnshire makers made spindle backed chairs with no splat but where there is a splat it is let through the back bow, not let into the front of the bow that is so very common on the southern chairs. I have yet to see a Lincolnshire chair with a roundel or cartwheel motif on the splat though I believe ones may exist.

Chairs from other regions usually have a scribe mark on the backbow and sometimes around the edge of the seat; I would not expect to see such decoration on a Lincolnshire chair - remember the word to describe these chairs is frugal with no unnecessary decoration.

Finally the most telling design feature that distinguishes East Midlands chairs from their southern counterparts is the joint where the backbow meets the arm bow: Lincolnshire makers tapered the back bow like the sharpening of a pencil whereas the Thames Valley makers seemed invariably to have been taught to cut a square shoulder which sits on the arm bow  Its always the first point that catches my eye whenever I come across a new chair to inspect.

A fuller discussion of what distinguishes a Lincolnshire chair from a Nottinghamshire chair or a Thames Valley one, written several years after I made these observations, may be found here.

© William Sergeant 2014 & 2019