Name/Title
Windsor ChairEntry/Object ID
95.4Description
Bamboo-turned, hoop-back chair. Made of hickory, white pine, and other mixed woods by the shop of Robert McKim of Richmond, VA.
The simple hoop-back form has seven three-segment bamboo-turned spindles to the back, a shaped seat with pommel in the front and incised gutter at the rear, and four three-section bamboo-turned legs connected by an H-stretcher with side members that swell at the centers and have an incised central line, and a bamboo-turned medial member.
Remnants of a label on the reverse of the seat read, at the bottom of the label:
And...ay Le...bet...
Lyle and...HESTE...Dimensions
Width
16-1/2 inDepth
16 inLength
36 inProvenance
Notes
This is one of two Windsor chairs formerly in the collection of the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia.
The Poe Museum's director at the time, James Ferqueron, expressed his interest in liquidating furniture irrelevant to their collection and offered to sell these Windsor chairs to Dr. Bruce English. In March 1995, Dr. and Mrs. English donated the chairs to PHMF.
While the fragments of the attached label on the reverse of the seat do not correspond with the labels of any documented Windsor chair makers, construction details allow this chair to be attributed to the McKim shop in Richmond, Virginia. Of particular distinction is that spindles 1, 4, and 7 do not come completely through the hoop as expected but terminate in the hoop itself. This technique is known only in chairs made by McKim.