Description:
One of a set of four fan-back Windsor side chairs with a yellow poplar seat with maples and other woods, covered with black paint probably over earlier paint. One of the chair has a paper label on the base that reads: "This chair once belongs to the West Granville Congregational Church. I wish it to be given to Miss Amy C. Swift." West Granville, Massachusetts, is about 20 miles southwest of Springfield, Massachusetts, on Route 57, one of the oldest east-west routes in New England, which connects Springfield to Great Barrington. Nancy Coyne Evans writes that the prominent elongated tulip shape may relate to Tracy family (Lisbon, Conn.) turnings or Rhode Island prototypes. However, David Pusuit (email 9/29/2005 in object file) notes: the chair contains a collection of regional influences, including Philadelphia characteristics such as comb, spindles that taper from top to bottom, leg spray, and sausage-like turnings at the tops of the post just under the seat; New York-like sharpness and "droop" of the front corners of the seat; and lower Connecticut Valley simplified baluster turnings without rings or flattened balls. Pusuit states, "since such legs are not now known in upper Connecticut Valley work, since NY chairs were shipped up the Connecticut River, since Philadelphia-trained craftsmen worked in Hartford and Windsor, and since West Granville is also about 20 miles northwest of Windsor via now what is Route 187, these chairs were probably made in Windsor or Hartford. As I see it, the only reason a Philadelphia-trained craftsman would combine such simplified legs with a classic crest, seat, and turned posts is that local customers wanted them."
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+0393 |
