Early Armchair from the William H. Winslow House, River Forest, Illinois, circa 1893

The William Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois, was a seminal work in the career of Frank Lloyd Wright. Built in 1893-1894, it was Wright’s first private commission as an independent architect. Winslow, a manufacturer of decorative ironwork, had provided materials for a number of projects completed by the architectural firm Adler and Sullivan. The architects declined Winslow’s request to design a new home for him, citing that they did only commercial buildings, but recommended he contact a former employee, Frank Lloyd Wright.

More significantly, the Winslow House signaled a radical change in American architecture and Wright later remarked that it was his first building in the Prairie style. Deeply influenced by Louis Sullivan’s 1892 James Charnley House (Chicago), in which Wright assisted in designing, the Winslow House clearly foreshadows Wright’s approach of integrating opposing geometric forms and a mastery of materials, whether in the construction of the house itself or of its interior decoration. This commission also marks one of Wright’s earliest attempts to create a unified and harmonious interior. He was responsible not only for the design of the rugs, leaded glass windows, ornamental wood and iron-work but also the furniture, of which this armchair is an outstanding and important example. Possibly inspired by Henry Robson Richardson's chair for the Glessner House (Chicago), the Winslow armchair represents one of Wright's first examples of free-standing furniture. The design, with its rectilinear form, further emphasized by the employment of slender rectangular vertical spindles between the arms and the backrest, was one Wright experimented with and developed for much of his life. Wright, fully appreciating the model, went so far as to have an identical pair made for his own studio in Oak Park, Illinois.