Now I Sit Me Down by Witold Rybczynski Page B

braces. The prices of these chairs varied: a plain sack-back might cost only a few shillings, whereas a respected maker could demand as much as fifteen shillings.
    After mid-century, Windsor chair manufacturing spread to New York and New England. Ebenezer Stone, a Boston maker of “Warranted Green Windsor Chairs,” advertised that his chairs were “painted equally as well as those made in Philadelphia.” Chairmakers in New York City developed a particularly elegant design in which the hoop-back and the arms were made out of one continuous steam-bent piece of hickory or ash. Because elm was rare, American makers generally used poplar or pine for the seat, and maple for the spindles. As in England, Windsor chairs were either stained or painted—green was popular, so were red and black.
    There is nothing rustic about American Windsor chairs, which were as likely to furnish a grand house as a roadside tavern. Jefferson owned more than twenty of them. What he called “stick chairs” stood in the entrance hall of Monticello and were moved around the house as required. He also owned an unusual revolving Windsor chair, in which he is said to have written the Declaration of Independence. Revolving Windsor chairs did not become common until the 1840s, so it is likely that Jefferson himself designed this chair. Washington, too, owned many Windsor chairs. He bought two dozen oval-back Windsor side chairs with fashionable “bamboo” legs from a Philadelphia maker, and placed them on the porch at Mount Vernon; he had the Windsor fan chair in his study, a Windsor armchair in his bedroom, and a Windsor high chair for his grandchildren. The most unusual of Washington’s Windsors was his “riding chair,” a cannibalized Windsor chair seat bolted to the frame of a two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy.

    Continuous-arm Windsor chair with bamboo legs
    The American Windsor chair had many specialized offspring. Windsor settees ranged in length from four to twelve feet. Windsor writing-arm chairs had one arm broadened into an oval writing surface. In some versions, the writing arm had a drawer for paper, pens, and ink; the sewing Windsor had a drawer under the seat. The smoker’s bow was a stocky chair with wide arms on which a pipe smoker could rest his elbow. The captain’s chair was another low-back Windsor chair, as was the firehouse Windsor. Stools, with three or four legs, were available in a variety of heights. Perhaps the humblest Windsor chair was the stick-back kitchen chair, similar to my flea-market side chairs. Here the design was reduced to its plainest and most utilitarian essentials: a solid shaped seat, a simple comb-back, turned legs and spindles.
    When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania two decades ago, my office was unfurnished, and I was asked what kind of chairs I would like. I chose Windsor chairs—a sack-back armchair for myself, and a bow-back side chair for visitors. The seat was pine, the turned pieces maple, and the bow-back ash. The Warren Chair Works of Warren, Rhode Island, which made my chairs, uses programmed lathes and electrical-powered cutting and drilling machines, instead of pole lathes, pit saws, and carpenter’s braces, but the design of my armchair is virtually identical to the sack-back that Benjamin Franklin occupies in Robert Edge Pine’s eighteenth-century painting Congress Voting Independence.
    Windsor chairs have been mass-produced since the nineteenth century, and although purists might consider the handmade versions superior, the design of the Windsor chair proved remarkably durable and unlike many handcrafted artifacts it survived industrialization intact. The explanation is simple. “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness,” observed Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He