THIRD QUARTER 18TH CENTURY

The Windsor chair is perhaps the best example of eighteenth nineteenth-century English vernacular seat furniture, almost becoming a national utility chair for use indoors or outside. The most common wood used for this type of chair is ash, beech or elm and sometimes yew or fruitwood. However, this chair is made from mahogany, the luxury wood of the 18th century imported from the West Indies. Such mahogany Windsor chairs served as robust hall chairs supplied to Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester (d.1759) for the South Hall, beneath the temple-pedimented portico, of Holkham Hall, Norfolk. Today some of the Holkham chairs are displayed in its Marble Hall (L. Schmidt et al, Holkham, Munich, 2005, plate II, p. 23).
It bears features belonging to examples from the Thames Valley, which covers Buckinghamshire and Surrey, encompassing the districts of Slough and Newington. The distinctive front cabriole legs of this chair do not appear on chairs outside this area. The chair's comb-back and hoop-back top rail are also elements which later personify the 'Windsor' type.