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 distinctive turnings and double grooves separating the spindle platform from the modeled seat. But by 1755, one or two chairmakers were producing high-back Windsor armchairs and highchairs that incorporated Gilpin’s innovations of turned arm supports and a crest rail terminating on carved scrolls while the eliminating one of the grooves of the spindle platform. Other features of these early Philadelphia high-back Windsors are side stretchers that are not symmetrical – the bulbous element, which the medial stretcher sockets into, is located closer to the rear of the chair – and the legs terminate in a cylinder form above ball feet.

Two highchairs are closely related to the Dietrich American Foundation highchair and all three were likely produced in the same shop. The first is in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg and was illustrated in Charles Santore’s The Windsor Style in America, Philadelphia, Running Press, 1981, p. 170, fig. 222. 

The second chair has only recently been published. It was owned by Charles (1935-2019) and Olenka Santore (1942-2019) and was sold as lot 141 at Sotheby’s January 19^th, 2023 sale of their collection, lot 141. I know the catalogue is correct in stating the highchair’s medial stretcher is restored because I replaced a poorly made previously restored stretcher soon after Charlie acquired the highchair in the late 1980s.

After several further developments in full-size Philadelphia high-back Windsor armchairs, a new model Windsor armchair, called sack-back in America and and round-top in England, was introduced. Seats were now oval with soft chamfers and the cylinder and ball feet of the high-back chair was replaced by tapering termination. (As usual with Windsor chairs, the story is a bit more complicated as there are some early sack-back chairs which retain some of the features of high-back chairs.) Also gone were carved volutes, a further simplification to facilitate ramped up production. Highchairs would continue to mirror full-size Windsor chairs as styles developed over the coming decades. 

Collecting Windsor highchairs is not everyone’s cup of tea. But understanding their extreme rarity and challenging design decisions, Charles and Olenka ultimately choose to add no less than three early Windsor high chairs to their collection

I’ll finish with an amusing anecdote. A year and a half ago I received images of all the lots in an upcoming single owner sale of American decorative art. Among a number of interesting Windsor chairs, I was surprised to see an image of a high-back highchair that had been illustrated in Santore’s  The Windsor Style in America, Running Press, 1981.

However, the image of the highchair was not in the books section of historic children’s and scaled-down furniture, but rather at the back of the book in a “questions and answers” chapter. The last question was “How can one guard against purchasing a fake or reproduction Windsor chair sold as authentic?” To make his point that reproductions are often stylistically incorrect, Santore illustrated a Wallace Nutting chair that he said had been advertised in 1927.

The highchair had been “purchased as an authentic piece of eighteenth-century American furniture.” Charlie and I both knew the owner who had purchased the chair unwittingly, and to their credit the owner kept the chair, using it as a learning tool while keeping it out of the marketplace. In the end, the Wallace Nutting highchair did not make it into the auction catalogue, it is hoped the highchair will continue to be recognized for what it truly is.