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Art of the Chair: Craftsman's hands-on way of making Windsors gives him a choice seat to history
Journal Photo by Jennifer Rotenizer
George Mathews’ chairs are built out of three different woods — the legs out of maple, the seats out of poplar and the spindles, arms and backs out of red oak.
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Published: July 4, 2009
George Mathews first noticed Windsor chairs on a high-school field trip to Philadelphia's Independence Hall. He was a sophomore, interested in cars and girls. But even then, he could tell there was something special about the wooden chairs, something different about their tapering, spindled backs and clean lines.
"They were just beautiful," he said. "It was unlike anything you could buy in a furniture store."
But it would be years later before Mathews even thought about woodworking, let alone building the delicate, iconic chairs.
He was living in Akron, Ohio, with his wife, Jeanne, in the 1970s. They bought a fixer-up built in 1932 and gutted it. Gradually, Mathews did more and more woodwork. At the time, his full-time job was as a dispatcher for a trucking company. The family moved to Winston-Salem in 1978. By 1984, Mathews was a terminal manager. But he left his job to pursue carpentry, building cabinets, built-in bookshelves and doing other interior carpentry. He made the cabinets in his own kitchen -- and even the trash can.
Still, he thought about those chairs. He bought a few books -- but he was intimidated by them. In 2000, he took a class with Mike Dunbar, a well-known Windsor-chair expert and maker, and the founder of the Windsor Institute, a furniture-making school in Hampton, N.H. When Mathews retired, he thought that making chairs might provide supplemental income.
Windsor chairs have had a following for centuries. Their origin and name is something of a mystery, though one story is that they were named for the town of Windsor, in England. Another is that King George III, who ruled from 1760 to 1820, was hunting near Windsor Castle and took shelter in a house. He was given a simple chair to sit on. He liked it and had some made for his castle, though Dunbar calls the story an old-wives' tale because the chairs were around during Queen Anne's reign in the early 1700s. He said that the first mention of Windsor chairs was in a 1709 British probate inventory, the inventory of a man's estate.
At first, Windsors were chairs for the elite and noble. They were more ornate and heavy -- the easy chairs of their day -- than later versions. Patrick Gordon, a British governor of Pennsylvania, brought five Windsor chairs with him to the American colonies around 1730.
Colonial furniture-makers started copying the chairs, and by 1750 Windsor's style had been re-interpreted, becoming lighter and smaller. And in the spirit of a young democracy, it became a chair of the common man. They were used in dining rooms and kitchens, lined along entryways and set outside in gardens and on porches. A 1799 inventory of George Washington's estate listed 30 Windsor chairs.
And Windsor chairs were strong. Plenty of antiques exist today, Dunbar said -- though they will cost, typically, between $5,000 and $10,000. The secret to their sturdiness is in their joints, built to tighten as you sit in the chair. The chair legs are splayed and directly connected to the seat. Chairs with legs directly joined to the back -- think of ladder-back chairs, or Chippendale-style chairs -- are likely to weaken as you sit in them.
"These guys were amazing," Dunbar said of Colonial chair-makers. "We think of them as kind of rural bumpkins, making rustic pieces of furniture. They weren't. They are the guys today who would be working for NASA or Microsoft."
"These chairs hold up," he said. "They don't break."
And they were made in great quantities, often semi-mass produced by groups of craftsmen and traded as commodities in the early Federal republic, like corn, lead or nails.
"They could be the product of both mass production or production of individual craftsmen in rural areas," said Robert Leath, the chief curator and vice president for collections and research at Old Salem Museum and Gardens. "It's one of the reasons why they proliferated across America in early 19th century."
Between 1797 and 1799, 10,000 Windsor chairs were shipped from Philadelphia to Havana, Dunbar said. "Windsors remained the dominant chair until about 1805 to 1810. They're made in numbers that would just blow your mind. They were literally everywhere."
Like everything, they went out of style, at least in mainstream America.
But everything old is eventually new again. Craftsmen such as Dunbar have helped keep interest in Windsor chairs and chair-making alive, passing along their knowledge in classes and books to such woodworkers as Mathews, who are still interested in making things by hand even when most furniture in people's houses is built on assembly lines and in factories.
You can buy mass-produced Windsor chairs today. Mathews has some around his kitchen table, but they don't have the look and durability of handmade chairs, he said. His wife has been nagging him to replace them with his own work.
Mathews makes settees -- basically a bench with a lithe back and arms -- as well as chairs. He has made arm chairs and rocking chairs and chairs with a small writing desk attached. It comes with an optional pen-storage drawer -- today, that compartment could also hold a TV remote if you wanted to lounge in your Windsor as you watch 21st-century entertainment.
Mathews' chairs are built out of three different woods -- the legs out of maple, the seats out of poplar and the spindles, arms and backs out of red oak. He ages the poplar and maple. The red oak needs to be greener, so it will bend.
Start to finish, it takes him about a week to make a chair. He builds them in his garage workshop in Winston-Salem, shaving the delicate spindles that make each chair's back, smoothing out the indentation that makes each chair's seat, and steaming and bending the impossibly thin backs and arms. Made with mostly rustic woodworking tools and without sandpaper, the chairs have the handmade look of old. The price ranges from $450 for the simplest chair to $750 for a 36-inch settee.
He paints all his work with historically-correct milk paint -- made from milk proteins, lime and pigments -- in earth-toned colors. On the bottom of the seat, he leaves a small oval bare. There, he adds the year and signs his name in ballpoint pen. They go to new owners with a simple guarantee -- if they break, Mathews will fix them for free as long as he is alive. He's 61. He said he has never had anyone take him up on that offer, in almost 10 years and about 100 chairs. "These chairs will outlast me," he said. "I hope people's grandchildren sit in them."
For him, the most satisfying thing about making chairs is perhaps the simplest -- he can sit in them when he is done.
And he has taken the Colonial theme to heart, too. He brings his chairs to festivals and historic re-enactments around the Southeast, dressed in period clothes -- knee breeches, a waist coast and Benjamin Franklin-style glass -- and he works on chairs while curious tourists come by. Sometimes Jeanne comes, too, sitting in a skirt and a bonnet as she knits in a Windsor.
Jack and Sara Hollan bought one of Mathews' chairs after he renovated a bathroom in their Winston-Salem home. Then, they bought six more to go around a table Jack Hollan built for the family's vacation home in Roaring Gap. This summer, the Hollans' son, Mac, will get married in Idaho, and family members are chipping in to buy six of Mathews' chairs to go around a table that Jack Hollan built for a wedding gift. "I love the handmade look of them. They are very light-looking, but very strong. And they're incredibly comfortable. George is not a craftsman, he is an artist."
Hollan said he thinks that well-built dining room furniture is a meaningful gift for newlyweds. "That's where you gather the family. There's something about dining-room tables and chairs. You just know over the years that many happy and many sad occasions are going to occur around the table."
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or a lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
■ Contact George Mathews, at 767-7468. True to his style of doing things the old-fashioned way, he does not have a Web site.
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