19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, May, 2003 by Michael Podmaniczky

At the time he was moving into Seymour's warehouse, Gragg advertised "all kinds of Fancy and Bamboo CHAIRS, of the newest fashion." (6) Al though the last quarter of the eighteenth century was best known for classically inspired furniture richly veneered with exotic woods, there was a foreshadowing of the decorative painting that was to become coincident with the evolution of the classical style in the nineteenth century. The most notable examples from this period are the well-known painted, oval-back chairs from the Derby families of Salem, Massachusetts (see P1. V). No doubt spurred by sophisticated English imports, a boom in decorative painting began throughout the United States in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

The confluence of form and color--the classical style and classically inspired painted motifs--provided a rich medium for local craftsmen to work with. It offered Gragg the opportunity to transcend the conventional and arrive at the elastic chain Although little has been added to the facts of Gragg's personal life since Kane's article, the pool of objects made by or attributed to him has grown substantially. The chairs themselves speak eloquently about the maker and continue to add to our understanding of his production methods. Moreover, recent study led to what can only be Gragg's personal copy of his patent, signed by President Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison, and Attorney General Caesar Augustus Rodney (1772-1824). It was discovered in the Carrier Library at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where Gragg's descendants apparently deposited it. (7) Before its discovery, the specifics of the patent were limited to a government report of patents issued between 1790 and 1836 , the year the United States patent office burned, destroying the government's copy of the elastic chair patent.

Gragg's reference to "bamboo" chairs in his advertisements is an unsurprising acknowledgement that he was most likely making windsor chairs as his bread-and-butter staple even after he began making his elastic chair. Kane recorded one rather heavy child's windsor chair by Gragg (owned by Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Massachusetts), but a number of individual chairs as well as sets of windsors made by or attributed to him have now come to light and clearly indicate a much more sophisticated eye and hand than is evident in the Sturbridge armchair. Two examples are illustrated in Plates VIII and IX. The armchair is branded by Gragg and is part of a set, the rest of which are side chairs. The side chair (Pl. VIII) is not branded, but it is attributed to Gragg on the strength of the shaping of the back. Standing alone, it is a curious, perhaps unique, example of the bamboo windsor style, exhibit ing a contoured back and rare shaping of the underside of the crest rail. The S-curved back stiles and spindles certainly reflect Gragg's design aesthetic, but an attribution to Gragg would have been considered weak without the evidence of the branded armchair. The similarities between the two chairs include the leg turnings, the "knifeedge" shaping of the seat front, the incised "guttering" of the upper front edge of both seats, the inset guttering along the back edges of the seats, and the squared pattern of the guttering around the base of the back stiles.