The wonderful thing about collecting chairs is finding something special! I remember having a conversation with a dealer about memorizing the designs of chairs in Dr B D Cotton's The English Regional Chair (1990) and then searching for something out of the ordinary. He was very dismissive and likened me to a train spotter for ticking off the pictures. He completely missed the point: the fun of the search! Anyway, I know this is not a Lincolnshire chair but its very existence is worth recording here because if you look in Cotton's book there are many pictures of the superb Windsor chairs that were made in Rockley, in Nottinghamshire, but there is no mention or picture of a side chair. They were thought not to exist. Well feast your eyes on this: the ironic thing is that this chair spent several years in an antique shop in Newark and I must have walked past it many times. There was nothing about it to suggest to me that it was a local chair and I never even stopped to inspect it. Side chairs with a fantail seat and 2 angled spindles joined into the hoop are a standard design in the Thames Valley and, as far as I am aware, this is the only East Midlands side chair featuring this design and construction method.
Only when a fellow collector told me that it was stamped with the maker's name did I inspect it closely.
Nottinghamshire bow back Windsor side chair stamped Nicholson Rockley WS 117 |
PS there is one other armchair from Lincolnshire recorded with a fantail and 2 angled spindles which will be posted tomorrow (update: now to be found here).
© William Sergeant 2020
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