Bob Dillon Windsor Chairs

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Description

First, A Little History: It is widely agreed that the Windsor chair was developed in the late 17th or early 18th century in the vicinity of Windsor, England. But as to who invented the thing in the first place, there are only theories. One suggests that a spinning-wheel maker was responsible. The splayed legs of his elegant machine are reminiscent of Windsor chairs in both decoration and geometry, while the wheel supports translate into arm-posts, the spokes into spindles. Add some bent wood to contain the back and you've got something we might recognize as a Windsor chair.Or maybe it was a wheelwright, or a turner -- or a farmer. In any case, by the 1720s they were widely available in England's southern counties, usually painted green, intended as garden (lawn) chairs.A couple of decades later, however, it was American Windsor chairs, built principally in Philadelphia, that were becoming known worldwide. In the Colonies frontier life, for many, was giving way to middle-class prosperity with its attendant demand for fashionable goods. There were also great numbers of tradesmen and vast reserves of raw material to supply them. Finally, there was the Windsor chair itself, still a relatively new concept, ripe for inventive interpretation.

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