Now I Sit Me Down by Witold Rybczynski

In 1757, he began to enlarge his house at Mount Vernon and to beautify its grounds, and over the next three decades he made it into a twenty-room mansion that was one of the larger houses in Virginia. He furnished the rooms with a variety of chairs from many sources. One of his earliest acquisitions was six used black walnut Chippendale-style side chairs, which he bought from a fellow officer while he was serving in the Virginia militia. Later, he ordered a dozen mahogany side chairs from his English agent in London; the wing chair in his and Martha’s bedroom came from an English auction house. In 1790, Washington bought several fauteuils and a bergère with a footstool from the Comte de Moustier, the departing French ambassador.
    The impressive main room at Mount Vernon rises the full two-story height of the house. Decorated in the Adamesque style, this salon was used for socializing, receptions, and dancing, and also functioned as a banqueting room—when a temporary table was set up on trestles. The room contained two dozen Sheraton-style mahogany side chairs as well as two grand sideboards, all made by John Aitken, a Scottish-born Philadelphia cabinetmaker. The chairs in the adjacent parlor were Chippendale-style mahogany cabriole side chairs, similar to the ones that Thomas Burling, a New York cabinetmaker, had supplied for Washington’s official residence when the federal capital was in New York City. Burling made the side chairs in the family dining room.
    Washington’s study contained a mahogany dressing table that he had bought from de Moustier, and a handsome tambour secretary made by Aitken. At the secretary stood an upholstered barrel-back swivel chair. Washington recorded that he paid Burling seven pounds for the “Uncom n Ch r. .” Such swivel chairs were indeed uncommon in America though not, as we have seen, in France—perhaps Washington came across one in de Moustier’s study. A month later, not to be outdone, Jefferson ordered his own swivel chair, the infamous “whirlgig chair,” with a taller back and bright red leather upholstery (Washington’s chair was black). Jefferson also added two “candle arms,” so that when he swiveled, light would follow. Different men, different chairs.
    The Stick Chair
    Washington had another unusual chair in his study. The chair at his writing desk was fitted with an overhead pasteboard fan that swung back and forth like an Indian punkah, the power being supplied by the sitter using a foot treadle. The inventor of the “Fan Chair” was John Cram, a Philadelphia musical instrument maker, who had built the first one in 1786 for the artist Charles Willson Peale and later made one for Benjamin Franklin. Cram built the support frame and the treadle mechanism; the chair itself was an ordinary Windsor, the most common chair of that time.
    The Windsor chair is an English invention. The key to its ingenious design is the seat, a thick slab of solid hardwood, carved with two shallow, saddle-shaped depressions to provide sitting comfort. The back hoop is a single piece of wood, steam-heated and bent into shape. The hoop is simply countersunk into the seat, as are the turned spindles and splayed legs—no complicated joinery or hardware is required. Although there are rare examples of mahogany chairs, English Windsors were generally made of a combination of commonplace woods: hard elm for the seat, dense beech for the turnings, and malleable ash or yew for the hoop. Windsor chairs were inexpensive—an unpainted chair sold for a few shillings, compared with more than a pound for a Chippendale-style mahogany side chair. They were used in taverns and public houses, and in the homes of ordinary country people; in wealthier households they served as outdoor furniture.
    The Windsor chair originated in the late seventeenth century in Buckinghamshire, whose extensive beechwood forests provided a ready supply of material for the