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| A Caistor chair - from John Shadford workshop WS 63 |
This chair turned up in a Grantham antique shop: they are just unmistakeable! There are some subtle difference compared to WS 62; no cut outs notched into in the crest rail, no rings on the back spindles and three rings on the legs. These chairs that are attributed to John Shadford in Caistor are really special - by that I mean that this chair design had no predecessor and no evolution. They just appeared in Shadford's notebook and it seems they were made in large quantities for many years. If you take a moment to consider the traditional Windsor chair, you can see a clear path in the subtle design changes over many years and regions , always being honed to meet the current tastes of fashion - not so with this chair. The reason may be that Shadford deliberately set out to design a new chair in an already extremely competitive market. When he decided to set up in his own business after being an apprentice to William Shirley for 14 years he must have realised that if he was going to stop in Caistor with his mother and their house-renting business he had to produce a different chair to that which was already being made there. Hence he sat down with a clean piece of paper and designed this chair from scratch: this is reinforced by his pencil drawings in his notebook - see these pages reproduced from his notebook He was a remarkable man to produce such a successful design and history does not give him enough credit. This chair is currently on loan to the Caistor Heritage centre, on public display.
© William Sergeant 2012 and 2020
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