Important Mahogany Finished Low-Back Knuckled Windsor Settee, Frederick County, Maryland, Circa 1800

"This is one of three known settees by this maker. It has a very unusual, dynamic design, with all spindles baluster-turned and with a rare bell-shaped cap that is echoed in the leg turnings. Only the center spindle is perpendicular, the others being progressively angled until the last spindle is parallel to the arm support. The bold knuckles (done in the Lancaster County style with a protruding center knuckle), shield-shaped seat (flared at the front edges), and baluster-like turning in the leg cylinder where the stretcher is socketed (where the leg would normally be straight) all mark this piece and the two others like it as the product of a single shop. At least one low-back armchair in exactly the same style is also known.¹

Note the beading on the front edge of the arm crest, which emphasizes an uncommon design feature of this piece: the arm crest, which in a Philadelphia low-back would overlap the arms, in this piece and the two other examples is actually cut from the same piece of wood--that is, there is a mortise-and-tenon joint rather than a lap joint. This is actually a stronger joint than those used on Philadelphia low-backs.

It is unusual for a settee to have a medial stretcher pattern like the one found here, which, in fact, is just like that found on certain Delaware Valley rush-bottom chairs. The side stretchers are in the English taste and in a pattern found among Philadelphia and Rhode Island Windsors.

The tall, turnip-like blunt-arrow foot adds a nice finish to the leg. Scribe marks on the underside of the seat of this piece mark the tentative leg-hole placement, but the holes were drilled elsewhere, suggesting that this may have been an experimental piece or a prototype." - Charles Santore, 1987

¹ One of the settees is illustrated in Nancy Goyne Evans, American Windsor Chairs: Specialized Forms, (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), p.103, fig. 1-76 and the armchair is illustrated in Charles Santore, The Windsor Style in America: Volume II, A Continuing Pictorial Study of the History and Regional Characteristics of the Most Popular Furniture Form of Eighteenth-Century America, 1730-1830, (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 1987), p. 66, no. 36.