Featured Windsor style chair

Fellow Antiquers,

Since my last visit I learn a bit more and bought a few more pieces I would like to restore. I would really appreciate if you could help me to find more details about them.

Chair was bough in the Netherlands.

Learning with every buy!


Thank you in advance for your knowledge.

Br,
João

 

This is a splat-back Windsor style chair in pine. Not an antique but a good sturdy chair.

 

Agree with verybrad, 20thC copy. These are actually called "Wheel-back Windsor chairs", hence the wheel decoration in the back splat. They were give this name because the first people to make them were wheel-rights in the 16th/17th centuries which the Windsor chair style came from. In fact the early Windsor chairs were not actually made in Windsor but a nearby town Called High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire and transported to Windsor. The early "Windsor's" were straight comb-back until the beginning of the 18thC when steam bending was developed.

 

Thank you both for the insight. I figured as much to tell you the truth, but for 10 euro I can afford to fix it, paint it and use it in a dinning table set!

But this was a start for me on Windsor style chairs. So I am hoping to capture some good ones and hopefully find some "real deals" where the piece is old. As I understand sometimes Windsor pieces are so difficult to date that only experts will be able to tell.

 

For example:

Could you help me identify the age of the below?

They seem older, and the seat much thinner.

 

Continuous arm Windsor, not old & not antique. The multi-board seat tells the tale here.

 

Yes it does. As does the lack of patina on the underside.

 

They seem to have been made in the last 20-30 years, maybe less, as the bottoms of the seats are almost virgin. The seat style is called a "saddle seat" and modern chair makers emulate this feature when reproducing antique chairs. If of any historical interest, the old "saddle seats" for chairs were made using an adze with the carver standing astride the rough seat block and hacking away. An old anecdote passed down to me by an ancient dealer was "in the 17th and 18th centuries, you could always tell who the village chair maker was, as he always one or two toes missing".

 

You are totally right I could have seen that one coming. As I read old seats in this type of chair were made out of on single piece of wood. Rookie mistake, which makes sense, still a rookie.

Again very insightful!

 

Before closing the topic and because with each picture I am learning something new I have 3 other chair of the same style but certainly different from the above I would like to get your insights on.

Namely how to tell (rather than the seat being a solid piece or the patina on it) if they are old and how old they are.

At least since it is sort of the same style I guess the indications could be the same, I understand other types of chair might have other types of age indicators.