Gillows of Lancaster and London as a design source for American chairs

Magazine Antiques, June, 1999 by Susan Stuart

As wholesale furniture makers, Gillows sold furniture at reduced prices to other British merchants and fellow cabinetmakers, including, for example, Gregson and Bullen (w. together 1800-1806), Liverpool upholsterers, who regularly bought from them and in 1801 inquired about the availability of windsor chairs for export.33 Liverpool had strong trade ties with the United States, so Gillows furniture could have traveled by this route as well.

Of course, Gillows journeymen and apprentices were familiar with the firm's designs, and at least one Lancaster chairmaker crossed the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, as his death in Cincinnati was recorded in April 1824.(34) Surely other cabinetmakers from the area emigrated in the eighteenth century and may have brought Gillows designs with them. What is clear is that by some route the firm's work arrived in the United States. It is hoped that further research will determine exactly how.

I would like to thank the trustees of the Winterthur Research Fellowship Committee for awarding me the Winterthur Research Fellowship that enabled me to do the research for this article. I am also grateful to the staff of the Winterthur Museum and Library for their help, especially Dwight P. Lanmon, Brock Jobe, Wendy Cooper, Michael S. Podmaniczky, Richard McKinstry, Neville Thompson, Bert Denker, and Pat Elliott. Finally, my gratitude is due to the staffs of the Lancaster University Library, the Lancaster Port Commission, the Westminister City Archives Centre in London, and the Lancaster branch of the Lancashire County Libraries.

1 John T. Kirk was one of the first authors to realize the importance of the furniture designs contained in a long series of estimate sketchbooks produced by Gillows from the mid-1780s on. See his American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1982). The Gillow Archive, the largest and longest cabinetmakers' records to have survived in the world, are housed at the Westminster City Archives Centre in London; microfilm copies are available in the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera in the Winterthur Library in Winterthur, Delaware. References to the latter are cited in this article by their Gillow Archive (GA) file number and reel number.

2 The Gillows drawings served different purposes. The one in Fig. 1 is taken from the manuscript Book for the Regulation of Journeymen's Wages, agreed to on September 3, 1785, and was intended as a record of what Gillows' journeymen were to be paid for making such a chair. The carefully colored drawing in Pl. VIII was probably intended to be shown to potential customers. It is contained in a book of such drawings dating from the late eighteenth century. The first record of a set of Chinese style chairs is an order on May 6, 1780, for "Mr. & Mrs. Thompson to be sent to the Isle of Man" (GA, 344/84, reel 40, Order Book, 1778-1781, p. 348).

3 ANTIQUES, May 1974, pp. 1155-1161.

4 Gillows is known to have sent drawings of designs to British customers on request (see n. 22).