The First Philadelphia Windsor Highchairs

As noted in the last post, Windsor chairmakers in Philadelphia were making highchairs shortly after they began producing high-back Windsor armchairs in the mid-1740s. No highchairs modeled on the earliest Philadelphia high-back Windsors with plain crest rails and shaved arm supports are known to have survived, nor have any highchairs been discovered with Thomas Gilpin's … Continue reading The First Philadelphia Windsor Highchairs

A Philadelphia High-back Windsor Highchair

The next Windsor form in chronological order by date in the Dietrich American Foundation collection is also the last Windsor acquired by H. Richard Dietrich Jr (1938-2007).  High-back Windsor high chair, Philadelphia, Penn., 1755-1765. Artist unknown. Yellow poplar seat, maple legs, stretchers, and arm supports, hickory spindles and arm rail, oak crest. H. 40, seat 21 3/4; W. … Continue reading A Philadelphia High-back Windsor Highchair

John Widdifield, Joiner

John Widdifield (1673-1720) was an English furnituremaker who immigrated to Philadelphia in first years of the eighteenth century. He was listed in William Macpherson Hornor’s Blue Book: Philadelphia Furniture in the “…astonishing roll comprising nearly one hundred” woodworkers working in in the Delaware Valley between 1682 and 1722. Cathryn McElroy in her Master’s Thesis, Furniture of the Philadelphia Area: … Continue reading John Widdifield, Joiner