A soupçon of Brown Windsor…

A NEW re-publication from Dover, of Nutting’s book on American Windsor chairs, and first published in 1917, is an intriguing look at the author as well as a study of the style. Nutting was variously a congregational minister, photographer, writer, antique collector and dealer and an “authority on early American life” who shrewdly acquired and created a market for the abundant, under-appreciated pieces of what became early Americana.

Nutting’s handbook gathers “all that is known of the Windsor – the lure is a larger subject than the lore”. Mystique surrounds its 18th century – or maybe 17th century – origins, including the apocryphal tale of George III – who while on a country jaunt found shelter from the rain in the simple home of a local peasant, who offered his simple peasant’s plank-seat stick chair to the royal posterior and so impressed the king that he commanded his royal carpenters to construct these stick chairs for Windsor Castle.

As early Windsor chairs were made for outdoor use, being lightweight they were likely to fall over in a storm but by the 1730s they were high fashion evolving from garden furniture to indoor seating, with the earliest known piece arriving with Patrick Gordon who went to Philadelphia in 1726 to serve as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania. Useful book for Americana collectors.

AS a sound investment compared to a 30-year period of stock market fluctuations, fine period furniture now stacks up far better, says a new survey, so a handy little aide memoire is Dates in English Furniture by N.C. Aveling, first published c.1907 and now re-published as the original text by The Restoration Publishing Company, PO Box 1, Lingfield RH7 6YT, at £3.49 inc. p&p.

This 36-page booklet offers a chronology of furniture styles with matching English and French monarchs, and classified tables give dates “of the coming in and going out of forms of construction and motives of decoration in english Furniture, from the end of the Fifteenth Century until the death of Sheraton”. Pity Mr Aveling stopped there. Excellent little reference on furniture decoration and motifs, what was in and what was not.