This chair is NOT by Philip Clissett, but I have a few reasons for discussing it here.

Firstly, it’s an armchair version of one of the chairs featured in the painting by Edward Thompson Davis that I discussed in a previous post. It’s likely to have been a common style of chair in the Worcestershire area in the mid-19th century. It was purchased by me from a private seller in Brierley Hill in the West Midlands.

Secondly, there’s a clear link to Clissett’s famous ladderback chair in that this chair has a similar taper and ball arm support (see below). Bill Cotton’s The English Regional Chair contains no clear examples of this particular pattern of support other than Clissett’s chair. A couple of Lincolnshire examples come close (NE196-197), but they lack the ball turning (well, half-ball, in reality). On Clissett’s chair, the underarm support looks at one with the overall Arts and Crafts look of the chair, and might be attributed to the influence of James MacLaren who commissioned the first of these, and made some design input. But the existence of a similar support on a this rather different West Midlands chair proves that it was in use as a local motif long before MacLaren arrived on the scene – there are other chairs that support this point, and I’ll post on them before long.

Thirdly, it’s an example of the sort of local chair that Philip Clissett must have been aware of, and that his own work must have stood alongside.

A more detailed description of this chair would not be amiss. It’s made entirely in ash and, unusually for a West Midlands chair, is pegged only at the rear of the top slat. There are the usual signs that it was made in cleft green wood, so that it would have been held together entirely by the shrinkage of the mortices around the tenons. That this has failed in the case of one of the arm supports is evidence by a large, old, iron nail having been driven into the edge of one of the through tenons.

The chair is quite heavily constructed with legs of about 1½ inches in diameter, tapering to 1¼ inches at the top. Aside from the tapered arm support, the stand out features are the sinuous arms – they are really beautifully shaped (see below). There are vestiges of green paint in places – I haven’t got a clue whether that is original.

Overall height is about 40 inches, about 5 inches shorter than Clissett’s tall chairs. Seat height is 15 inches, about 2 inches lower than Clissett’s adult chairs – low chairs like this seem quite common. But it’s quite a wide chair – the seat measures 21⅜ inches at the front. With the sinuous arms, it will accommodate a substantial person.

There’s a lot of wear to this chair. The top left finial is part worn away. The arm ends are well worn, particularly to the right where much is missing. The lower front rung is well worn, a good indicator of age. But the best indicator of substantial use is the amount of wear to the inside of the arm supports which has completely removed the ring turning at the bottom.

No indication of maker, I'm afraid, which is a pity but pretty standard for chairs from this area.

or a while during my research into Philip Clissett, previously unknown examples of his designs turned up fairly frequently. But the past two or three years have been a barren period, until I was contacted by Stephen Farr. Stephen is related to Philip Clissett, and has recently acquired a chair that appeared to be by Clissett (having the PC stamp) but differed from anything on this website in several respects.
The chair is a high-backed armchair with a rush seat, and it follows the general pattern of Clissett’s spindleback armchairs. But this one has a spindle pattern not previously seen on an armchair, and is an elongated version of the most complex of Clissett’s known patterns – known only from one or two side chairs by Philip himself (chair no 10 on the spindleback chair page), and by his brother-in-law William Cole (chair no 3 in the WC section of the relatives’ chairs page). The pattern is based on other Clissett patterns, but includes a ball with V-cut below at the top, an ovolo with taper below at the bottom, and a double V-cut (instead of the usual single) at the mid-constriction.

While the fancy spindle singles this chair out as something special, additional turned rings on the front legs add to the distinction – there are two extra below each arm support turning, and two extra above the feet. Similar additional rings are seen on the fanciest of Clissett and Cole’s side chairs, which have equivalent fancy spindles.

The last distinctive feature of this chair is the single front stretcher, in contrast to Clissett’s almost universal double stretcher. The only other exception to his double rule are, again, the fanciest of side chairs which sport the only known examples of Clissett pattern-turned stretchers .

Overall, this chair is the most complex armchair by Philip Clissett found to date. Certainly, there will be others out there. Please get in touch if you know of any.

Harold Gilman (1876-1919) was an important member of the Camden Group, a group of artists that included Walter Sickert and Augustus John. This picture, painted in 1916, includes a clear and prominent Clissett chair. The image is known to be of Gilman's own rooms in Maple Street, off Tottenham Court Road. He had previously lived in Letchworth where he may well have come across Clissett's chairs, which we know to have been in a number of houses.

We can only assume that this chair belonged to Gilman himself. Whatever the case, Gilman can be added to the lengthening list of artists and architects who lived with Clissett's chairs.

This painting is in the Kirklees Collection of the Huddersfield Art Gallery. Gilman was the subject of a major exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in 2019.

The rate of discovery of new Philip Clissett chairs seems to have slowed, but I came across this one because of a photograph of a William Cole chair in Christopher Gilbert's book English Vernacular Furniture 1750-1900. Enquiries at Leeds led to this unusual armchair also owned by the Gallery. 

The chair is unusual chiefly because it is a spindleback with tapered arm supports, and the broad flat arms - these are exactly the type seen on most of Clissett's well-known ladderbacks. They contrast sharply with the bulbous arms support and the deeper light or heavy arms usually seen on the spindlebacks. This cross-over could indicate that this spindleback is later in date, with a customer demanding these elements from the ladderback. Alternatively, it's equally possible that these elements always existed in Clissett's repertoire, but were rarely used. Unfortunately, in the absence of perfect provenance for the spindleback chairs, we cannot date them to any particular phase of Clissett's life.

The use of these elements from the ladderback links this chair with an unstamped hybrid chair discussed in an earlier post. That chair has pretty good provenance, and the existence of this very similar chair with Clissett's stamp makes it even more likely that it is one of his.

The Leeds chair is also unusual in having a crest rail made from sycamore. Clissett often used cherry for the crest rail and the arms; walnut and laburnum have also been recorded.

A photograph of this chair also appears in Christopher Gilbert's Furniture at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall.

I am very grateful to Adam Toole of Lotherton Hall for all his help with this chair, and for providing the photograph.

I'm told that Tinsmiths of Ledbury, Herefordshire is staging an exhibition during July 2017 of handmade chairs. Tinsmiths hold annual craft exhibitions, and the subject this year is to celebrate the legacy of Philip Clissett in his bicentennial year. Currently, the chairmakers taking part will be Mike Abbott, Sebastian Cox, Gudrun Leitz, Koji Katsuragi, Neil Taylor and Lawrence Neal. Lawrence, of course, still makes a version of the famous Clissett ladderback chair.

The exhibition will run from 30th June until 30th July. I don't know more about it, but you can get further information by emailing press@tinsmiths.co.uk, or keep an eye on the Tinsmiths' Facebook page.

This photograph was given to me ages ago by Bill Cotton, to whom I'm eternally grateful for this record of the only known stool by this chairmaker. Yet another example of the country craftsman's willingness to produce whatever his customer's wanted.

It's possible that Clissett made many of these, but this is the only one that's turned up so far. How do we know it's by Clissett? Well, I have Bill's word for it, and the style is exactly right. The turnings on the top and feet of the legs are exactly those used by Clissett on his ladderback side chairs. I'd still like to handle the stool myself though, and I'm sure that there would be other clues not visible in the photograph. Unfortunately, we have no idea of the stool's whereabouts. If you know, or think you have a stool made by Clissett, then please contact us.

I've included the stool on the Special Chairs page of the website.

Here is a list of Clissett's chairs in public and private collections. In most cases, these are not on public display, though I have noted when they are. But, to counter that, they are generally shown on the organisation's website. If you want to see chairs that are not on public display, then this is usually possible if you make arrangements ahead of a visit. In some cases, there is an entrance fee – this will be obvious from the organisation's website.

Where possible, I've given a link to the organisation's website, followed by link(s) to any online information about the chair(s) they hold. In some cases, there is no online information, or only some of the chairs they hold have online details (e.g. the Geffrye Museum).

Not all of the information given on these websites is accurate, and it is always best to use this Philip Clissett website to make any statement about him or his work.

If you know of any other museums or collections holding examples of Clissett's work, please contact us.

Victoria & Albert Museum
Has a ladderback armchair and a very unusual ladderback child's high chair.

Art Workers Guild
The Meeting Hall contains by far the largest collection of Philip Clissett chairs in the world, all ladderback armchairs. That these are by Clissett is well known, so it is odd that the AWG's website now (at the time of writing) claims them to be by Ernest Gimson and his apprentices!

No. 7 Hammersmith Terrace (Emery Walker's House)
Has a single ladderback armchair on display in the dining room (see photo on linked web page).

Geffrye Museum
Has a ladderback chair and two PC-stamped spindleback armchairs.

William Morris Gallery
Has a ladderback armchair.

 Worcestershire County Museum, Hartlebury
Has a ladderback armchair and a number of PC-stamped spindleback chairs.

The Wilson, Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, Cheltenham
Has a ladderback armchair (usually on display as part of the permanent Arts & Crafts exhibition), and a PC-stamped spindleback chair. The ladderback originally belonged to the Arts & Crafts designer Ernest Barnsley.

Herefordshire Museums (Museum Resource and Learning Centre, Hereford)
Has a ladderback armchair and several interesting PC-stamped spindleback and other chairs including two flap-seated prayer chairs.

Butcher Row House Museum, Ledbury
Has a ladderback armchair and a ladderback side chair on permanent display.

New Walk Museum, Leicester
Has a good collection of ladderback armchairs and a side chair (scroll down the linked web page to see several Clissett-made chairs).

Rodmarton Manor, Gloucestershire
Has two ladderback armchairs on display.

Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery, Glasgow
Has a single ladderback side chair that's now properly attributed to Clissett/MacLaren, though it's still misattributed to Charles Rennie Mackintosh on the Hunterian web catalogue.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Has a single ladderback side chair. The online record for this chair used to have a photograph of the chair, but this had been removed at the time of writing. It can, however, be seen on Flickr. Note that some of the information about Clissett is incorrect, as is the species of timber the chair is made from.

Crab Tree Farm, Illinois
Has a ladderback armchair originally misattributed to Ernest Gimson but now properly attributed to Clissett and MacLaren (parts of the original misattribution are still showing on the website at the time of writing).

You might look at this elegant five-rung side chair, and declare that you'd seen it before on this website. At first sight, it seems identical to the side chair (No 4a) illustrated on the Ladderbacks page that is, essentially, a full-size armchair without the arms. But this chair is different. The dimensions of its seat is about 90% of the size of the seat on the armchair. This makes the back narrower, so the rungs of the back are scaled down accordingly and, because the overall height is the same, this chair appears taller and, arguably, even more graceful.

One of the two bills of sale that have survived from Clissett's workshop details two types of armchair. The "Ordinary size, Low back, Rush-seat Chairs, without Arms" is almost certainly the small three-rung side chair, No 6 on the Ladderbacks page. The others are "High back, Ash Rush-seat Chairs without Arms, second size". Until now, I had no idea what was meant by "second size". Now, it seems entirely possible that this new chair is the second size, while the full size side chair is likely to be the first size.

Another little mystery potentially solved.

I've long puzzled over how Philip Clissett bent the curved parts of his chairs. Modern woodworkers would tell me that he must have steamed or boiled the parts before bending them in some sort of jig (you can watch Mike Abbott do this in a Youtube video) . They would then have been retained in a similar jig while they dried out.

We have two quite detailed accounts of how Clissett made his chairs. Both are incomplete, and only one comes from a known source – an interview with Clissett's grandson, Will, who made chairs alongside his grandfather for nearly twenty years. Neither account mentions steaming or boiling. Chair legs were simply bent, apparently cold, in a jig.

It was green woodworking guru Mike Abbott who gave me a clue to what might have been going on. He asked me why there was such a difference between the back legs of Clissett's chairs and those produced by Edward Gardiner and his followers, Neville and Lawrence Neal – who make copies of Clissett's chairs. In contrast to the curve of Clissett's, the legs on the other chairs have a distinct kink. You can watch Lawrence bending chair legs in a short video of him at work. This is instructive, because the jig that Lawrence uses is more or less identical to Clissett's, and should produce the same results – but doesn't.

You will see that Lawrence boils the legs, then bends them over a fulcrum in the jig. My thought was that the hot, relatively soft wood bends at the fulcrum resulting in this kink with quite straight timber above and below. On the other hand, if Clissett bent chair legs cold, then I could imagine the stiffer timber resulting in a relatively smooth curve over the fulcrum. In one of the accounts of his methods, there is a graphic description of how the jig containing eight bent legs was placed in a cooling bread oven for twenty to thirty minutes, then left in a warm place to dry out. I believe the high temperature in the oven would result in the same softening of the timber that is caused by steaming or boiling.

There is no question that the oven trick will set bent green wood. You can try it with small stuff cut from the hedgerow, and it works convincingly. The big question is, can you bend a chair leg (1¼ inches thick) without heating it first?

Mike Abbott was doubtful. But he kindly, and very open-mindedly, gave me a chance to find out. He made a leg slightly thinner than he normally does, adding 10% to the usual diameter of a Clissett – then gave it to me to try to bend. To his surprise, and mine, it went very easily. He then tried it with one of his slightly thicker pieces – again, no problem.

There are several books out there that deal with bending wood, and some of them refer to cold bending. All seem to consider it of limited use, mainly because of the tendency for the wood to regain its original shape soon after release from pressure. But none seem to consider the use of heat after bending. So maybe Clissett was using a method that has since been lost.

Cold bending would be of no use for the dramatic curves of Windsor chairs but, for gentler bends there is clearly some potential – if a woodworker has access to a suitable source of dry heat. Clissett was, of course, using heat that would otherwise have gone to waste, so keeping his costs to a minimum. We still can't be certain that Clissett didn't steam or boil chair parts before bending, but we now know that he could have done it without – and if he didn't need to steam or boil, why would he have done so?

You can read Mike Abbott's account of this experiment, with photographs, on his blog.

Although Philip Clissett made spindleback chairs with wooden seats, the only ladderback chairs known to be made by him are rush-seated. Thanks to the sharp eye of Paul Shutler, we now know of the existence of at least one ladderback with a wooden seat.

This chair is extraordinary in more ways than one. It's built on Clissett's spindleback frame which differs from the usual ladderback in having no finials, vase-shaped front feet, and entirely different arms and under-arm turnings. In addition, it's stamped "PC" on the top of the front legs - the normal ladderbacks are are almost never stamped, and can't be stamped in this position because of their finials.

Furthermore, the slats on this ladderback are very different. Although graduated in terms of both height and width of the central part, this graduation is nowhere near as marked as normal, and the upper slats have less height than usual. And, whereas each slat would normally be shaped towards the top to create a blade-like edge, these are entirely unworked leaving a square edge along their entire length.

It's tempting to speculate that this chair is the forerunner of the famous ladderback, tweaked by James MacLaren, bought by many Arts & Crafts practitioners and followers, and still gracing the Meeting Hall of the Art Workers' Guild. There are similarities to a chair made by Philip's uncle which adds some credence to the speculation. But there is also some evidence that Philip made chairs that mix the styles seen in his spindlebacks and ladderbacks. So we're left, yet again, uncertain of exactly what we're looking at!

Many thanks to Paul for letting me know about this chair, and giving me an opportunity to have a good look at it (and for letting me use the photographs).