Featured What do y'all think about this rocker?

This guy has been at the local thrift store for months.
I really love it, despite the discoloration on the seat.

Sorry the pictures are blurry.
This thrift store hates dealers (so much they've hired people specifically to pull the antiques out, price it retail, and opened their own antique shop section). I think they know Im in the business.
They aren't overly kind and seem to always be side-eyeing me

They have this chair priced at $220.
Well out of my range, even for keeps

I'd just like to know who made it and when it was made..

 

I love the painting on the splat and rail! So different from the leaves and fruit kind of décor that you see on most? Almost Egyptian? or "mystic" look in my eyes.

$220 is way too much me as well. But if I had won the Powerball last night (which obviously I did not!) it might be on my list.

 

It looks almost carnival-esq to me..
But that's, what I love about it..

I didn't know if there was a time period or area this could be attributed to

 

You see stenciling like that on early 19th century pieces, but I'm guessing this is a ca. 1900 revival piece? Anyway, I think they've got one too many decimal places in that price.

 

You know..
Looking at the wear on the rest of the chair vs the backing...
It doesn't add up

 

Definitely old. How old is the question. Would think safely 19th century. Single board seat? If so, then at least mid 19th century. Think the decoration is probably patriotic American with the red white and blue coloring. Taped up stretcher? Splotch on the seat bothers me more than anything else. Something on there or is it paint loss. If in a bit better shape, I think the $200.00 price not terribly out of line. Even so, where will you find another?

 

The repeated use of the Star of David is an interesting touch. Although its been around for centuries, its use didn't really proliferate until the First Zionist Congress in 1897. So yeah, ca. 1900. Too bad about the condition.

 

The colors are not so much red white and blue, more red gold, orange, olive, and blue

I read the first Jews came over in the 1500s, but they they had definitely "set up camp" during our colonization period.. but I dint know how predominant they were in furniture making.
Commissioned?
Maybe not even meant to be the star off david?

I was looking in my Penn country antiques book and it says its a splat back Boston rocker via the curved front and back.


I was reading the history on Boston Rockers and came across this amusing account the English had on rocking chairs as a whole

" Many Europeans couldn’t understand the American addiction to rockers. In fact, some visitors considered the new contraptions positively bizarre, if not almost immoral. In 1835 an English visitor wrote of the profusion of rockers she found on the steamer Charles Carroll : “Others sit lazily in a species of rocking chair—which is found wherever Americans sit down—cradling themselves backwards and forwards, with a lazy, lounging, sleeping air, that makes me long to make them get up and walk.”

Her ascerbity was echoed three years later by the British traveler Harriet Martineau: “In these small inns the disagreeable practice of rocking in the chair is seen in its excess. In the inn parlors are three or four rocking chairs in which sit ladies who are vibrating in different directions and at various velocities, so as to try the head of a stranger. How this lazy and ungraceful indulgence ever became general, I cannot imagine, but the nation seems so wedded to it, that I see little chance of its being forsaken.”
http://www.americanheritage.com/content/boston-rocker

Looks like they started gaining face about 1830 and sometime after 1840 started becoming mass produced, per the above link.

"Fun" Fact: Lincoln was shot in a Boston Rocker.


I'm going to search now when and in what other instances the star off david has been used in the US

 

Good stuff!

 

The use of the star of David can also be Masonic or just plain decorative. The Mormons also use it a lot, as do esoteric cults.

 

Barely saw the taped up stretcher....Good Catch!!! The splotch on the seat looks to me kind of like carefully sanded down wood filler!! WHO the heck would tape up a stretcher and then put a $200.00 price tag on it????

 

For my 2 cents I think it is overpriced for sure but I love how obvious it is that it was a central piece of furniture to someone for so long. It took a lot of sitting and rocking to get that wear. And the back splat is gorgeous!

 

"All it needs is love!"

 

...and about $50 off the price tag!

The Star of David turns up all over the place, with or without Jewish involvement, so it's really not much of a clue.

 

Huh. Whether with Jewish involvement or not, I've always found it's use in antique furniture decoration to be unusual enough to be remarkable and oftentimes quite useful.

 

I don't know about furniture decoration, but I've seen it in lots of other places. Six pointed stars are popular. They're easier to sew or draw than five-pointed ones.

 

That about kills the value. Maybe someone started to try and restore this and gave up. Not really the way to go about it.

 

They may have concentrated on fixing up Grandma's chair well enough to use and not cared about the cosmetic aspect.

 

To me, the splotch...looks like a stain.....u can still see the detail line run thru it.

It may be overpriced.....or underpriced.....the more you look at it the nicer it gets..

 

The spot looks like it's been bleached