Incollect Magazine - Issue 6

Antiques & Fine Art 93 I coll ct Magazine furniture collection. He admired their complexities of construction, sculptural form, and the fact that the first Windsor chairs made in America were produced in nearby Philadelphia. 1 While all the Windsor seating furniture Dietrich collected was ultimately bequeathed to the Foundation at the time of his death, for many years they would remain in his personal collection and part of the furnishings of Arkadia. What led Dietrich to aspire to add Windsor chairs early on in his pursuit of Americana is uncertain, though he would have known they had long been recognized as a category collectors of Americana might choose to pursue. Wallace Nutting’s Furniture Treasury 2 has no less than ten pages illustrating Windsor settees and a remarkable fifty-eight pages of full-size and child’s-size Windsor chairs. Chapter X in William Macpherson Hornor, Jr’s Blue Book of Philadelphia Furniture 3 is titled “Windsor and Rush-Bottom Chairs.” Hornor described Windsors as “characteristic types of Philadelphia furniture.” The sale of the collection of the J. Stogdell Stokes (1870– 1947) at Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1948 included numerous American Windsor chairs, many formerly in Nutting’s collection. Stokes was a Philadelphian who was president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1937 Fig. 2: Low-back Windsor settee, Lancaster County, Penn., 1780–1800. Yellow poplar, maple, hickory. H. 30½, W. 77½, D. 21 in. The original green paint survives under a later darkened over-varnish. Photo by author. until his death and had written one of the earliest articles on Windsor chairs in which he asserted “Philadelphia was the birthplace of the American Windsor chair.”  4 Early in his collecting career Dietrich relied on advice from Elinor and Horace W. Gordon of Villanova. Meeting the Gordons after attending a lecture given by Elinor on Chinese export porcelain in 1963 led to a friendship that helped shape and define Dietrich’s growing interest in local decorative arts. With the assistance of the Gordons, Dietrich’s Windsor collection began with the purchase of two chairs and a settee in 1966. Horace encouraged Dietrich’s acquisition of a high-back armchair which had been advertised by Millbrook, New York, dealer Charles Woolsey Lyon (fig. 1). 5 Both Dietrich and the Gordons would have taken note of the monumental scale and rare feature of mahogany arms, arm supports, and short spindles of Lyon’s high-back armchair. That it held the possibility of a provenance that could be researched would also have been enticing to Dietrich. “R. R. Wurts” is written on an old paper tag attached to the bottom of the seat. According to Lyon, the chair was “acquired from a direct descendent of Robert Kennedy Wurts, Esq., who inherited it from his ancestor, one of the foremost original Swedish families to settle in the lower Delaware River area.”