Pair Of Yew Wood & Elm Gothic Windsor Arm Chairs Circa 1750 With Later Elements

Pair of yew wood and elm Gothic Windsor Arm Chairs circa 1750 with some later elements, English circa 1750.

height: 40 in. 101.5 cm., width: 24 in. 61 cm., depth: 24 in. 61 cm., seat height: 19 in. 48 cm., arm height: 28.5 in. 72 cm.

Sold as a pair.

** The Windsor chair was named for Windsor Castle, where such chairs were used in the garden as early as 1725. Indeed, the English nobility used Windsor chairs outdoors in the gardens and parks of their country estates, and in small boats, as well. The shape was designed to provide shelter from the wind. According to Daniel Defoe, the Windsor chair “is said also to be Queen Elizabeth’s own invention, who, though she delighted in being Abroad in the Air, yet hated to be ruffled with the wind.”
By the late 1750s the English Windsor chair had become popular in inns, taverns, libraries, and meeting facilities. Late-eighteenth-century documents described the chair’s use in daily life. Tobias Smollett, while imprisoned in 1759, described Windsor chairs in public houses in his Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves thus: On the Great Northern Road from York to London four travelers were driven for shelter into a little public-house on the side of the highway. The kitchen, in which they assembled, was the only room for entertainment in the house, paved with red bricks, remarkably clean, furnished with three or four Windsor chairs.

Excerpted from “Chairs, A History”, p. 95, Florence de Dampierre, Publisher: “Harry N. Abrams, Inc.”, 2006 https://www.abebooks.com/9780810954847/Chairs-History-Dampierre-Florence-0810954842/plp