Three Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back chairs compared:

WS 196: L-R WS 11, WS 195 and WS 59 side by side

Firstly, an apology for the slightly unsophisticated picture but it will serve to illustrate the point that I want to make.

The middle one is of a pair which appears at No 195; the RHS of the three is by far the most common Lincolnshire rush seated chair that I see: they have the appearance of being made in the first half of the 19th century; there is a pair on this site at No 59, many of which have a provenance back to the south of the county and I am certain that they were made by the Spikins families in Boston and Spalding. The LHS appears at No 11.  I have a provenance from the previous owner that goes back nearly a century and is associated with the Sleaford area. I just wonder if it was made in that town by the family of Hugh and Ann Mason. I know of only one other and that is in a village near to Spilsby.

It is immediately obvious that the front stretcher of each is identical and the pattern of the other stretchers is the same. The front legs are similar but have notable differences to make them distinct from each other. The middle one has only three back supports and the whole is strengthened by a top rail. These are the explicit design features that suggest a local pattern. What is not visible from the above picture are the implicit construction marks. All of them are exactly the same in having shallow incised rings to the back legs to aid in the drilling of the holes and all the back supports are morticed into the back legs and secured with thin metal pins. I have no doubt that the makers of these chairs were all apprenticed to workshops in the county of Lincolnshire and there they learned the same techniques for manufacturing this pattern of a chair while placing their own individual subtle design features.

© William Sergeant 2019

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping, top ladder damaged; straight front legs morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 11 Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair

This one turned up recently (March 2012) at a local auction house described as an early 20th century Arts and Craft chair - I could see by the photo published on the internet that it was a Lincolnshire chair and when I was able to handle it and inspect it closely everything was right about it . It was at the time I found it the only one I had seen with straight front legs and it does not appear in Dr B D Cotton's The English Regional Chair (1990). The top ladder at the back is missing a piece. This chair is compared with two others at No 196.

© William Sergeant 2019

Lincolnshire rush-seated bar top ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened stay rail fixed onto prominent button turnings; 3 plain domed ladders; straight turned front legs with tulip-shaped feet, morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 195 Bar top rush-seated ladder back side chair

My thanks must go to James Drake, a fellow chair collector, who was kind enough to inform me about some rush-seated chairs that were being offered for sale at Gildings auctioneers in June 2018 at Market Harborough. I was able to look at an image online and decided that they were worth bidding for - there were four chairs in the lot, a pair of bar top as above, one the same as No 59 on this site and a Lancashire wavy back chair. There was only one bid, which was mine, so I managed to secure them for the princely sum of £10 plus commission.

In all my years of collecting these Lincolnshire rush-seated chairs, I have never come across these bar topped examples, indeed there is only a single image of this type in all the published literature that I am aware of, but I am in no doubt that they were produced in the county.  This chair is compared with two others at No 196.

© William Sergeant 2019

1

 

Ladder back side chair with bar top, from Leicester house clearance, same front stretcher as No. 2, No. 3 & No. 7, with the same implicit constructional markings. Probably from South Lincolnshire.

3

 

Ladder back side chair with very old rushing, provenanced to the Sleaford area, so could have been produced in the workshop of Hugh Mason before 1825, or by his wife, Anne, who succeeded him.

9

Rush seated ladder back chair with the same provenance, and from the same house, as chair No 7.