Lost Art Press

A Visit with John Porritt, Chairmaker

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Welsh stick chairs turn up in some of the strangest places, including the Hudson Valley of New York.

Today on my drive home from Fine Woodworking LIVE (the event was wonderful), I was invited to stop by the shop of John Porritt, a woodworker who trained in the U.K., has made many traditional chairs and now lives and works in a small town in Upstate New York.

While a lot of Porritt’s work is in the restoration of old chairs and tools, he also builds new English and Welsh chairs using traditional methods. In fact, John Brown praised one of Porritt’s Welsh chairs in one of his Good Woodworking columns in 1995 (which is about as good as it gets for chair praise).

Porritt’s shop is scenically located behind his 1700s-era house and tucked next to a swift-running stream. It’s an old barn with a big front door, one window and plenty of space for Porritt’s band saw, workbench and all the old wood he brought over from the U.K. when he and his American wife moved to New York in 2008.

In addition to being stocked with impressive stacks of old wood (some of it 300 years old), Porritt’s shop is full of chairs he has built and collected over the years. I could write a blog entry about each of these chairs – Porritt has fantastic taste in vernacular chairs – but I didn’t have time to take notes as he described each one.

So you’ll have to settle for some shallow descriptions that I hope are accurate.

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One of the first chairs he showed me was this vernacular American Windsor. We see few to none of these sorts of chairs in the Midwest, so it was a delight to look it over. The wide sweep of the chair’s crest made it quite comfortable. The saddling of the seat was unusual. It’s wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was nothing my buttocks had felt before – the seat’s pommel was longer than is typical.

Also fascinating is this chair. It is remarkably similar to some of the earliest known English Windsors that were advertised for sale in 1725. The seat and the way it is saddled is astonishing. It has been heavily sculpted above and below to create a seat that looks like it is thin and has been bent like a modern Eames chair. But it’s a solid piece of fairly thick wood.

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Inside Porritt’s house is his favorite chair, a Welsh stick chair that presses all of my buttons. The legs are slightly curved outward. The armbow is made from a branch that was resawn and then scarfed together with a long diagonal joint. The seat reflects the shape of the armbow. And the undercarriage is similar to some chairs I’ve seen at St Fagans.

But it’s the overall effect of the chair that is what’s lovely. Porritt says it’s the last thing he sees every night before he goes to bed and it makes him happy.

Back in the workshop, this little Welsh chair is also a looker. The rake of the spindles, the shape of the arm and the details of the crest are some of the highlights of the chair. (You’re going hear a lot more about this chair in the future as I purchased it from Porritt.)

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Here you can see two of Porritt’s chairs on either side of his wood-burning stove in his shop. His chairs sit very well and harness a lot of the details of Welsh chairs that I love. His chairs reminded me a lot of Gareth Irwin’s chair that I saw in my visit to Wales last year.

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Here’s another Welsh chair that is on the small side. I immediately assumed the chair had once been a comb-back and had suffered a comb-ectomy. Porritt said he was 90 percent certain that was not the case. He’d found bits of the original red paint lodged in the top of the chair’s sticks. The patination on this chair was quite lovely.

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Finally, this Windsor chair that Porritt thinks was made by someone who also made ladderbacks. Porritt says many of the chair’s details, including the shaved components and the way the spindles were made, suggested a ladderback chairmaker had produced this chair.

I took a lot more photos, but I need to get to sleep. I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot more about Porritt in the coming months – he gives talks to organizations and schools on his craft – and we might even be able to lure him to Covington to teach a class next year.

— Christopher Schwarz

Avenues of Elms

Posted on by saucyindexer

The American Elm (Ulmus americana) known for its rapid growth and and hardiness was the perfect tree to enhance the towns and cities of a young America. Although there are many Elm Streets and Elm Avenues the devastation of Dutch elm disease (DED) left few of the namesake trees standing.

If you are age 40 or younger you may never have seen the elms of a truly majestic Elm Street. Trees were planted to form vistas of cathedral ceilings. Unfortunately, planting the elms in such density contributed to the spread of DED.

American elms resistant to DED, stands that have been carefully managed and varieties bred for disease resistance can be still be found.

One of the best known stands of old-growth elms can be found in Central Park in New York.

The poet and essayist Stanley Plumly died earlier this month. He was born in Barnesville, Ohio and grew up in Winchester, Virginia and Piqua, Ohio. He was most recently a professor at the University of Maryland and served as Maryland’s Poet Laureate from 2009-2012. In 2016 he was interviewed on the Kenyon Review podcast during which he read his poem ‘Dutch Elm.’ As woodworkers I think you will appreciate how he expresses what was lost, and what can be lost, when part of our natural world is damaged.

If you would like to listen only to his reading of the poem, it starts around minute 19:55. Click here to listen.

The gallery below shows the leaves, flowers, fruit and bark of the American elm.

–Suzanne Ellison

Origin Stories

Posted on by Lost Art Press

LAP_logo_stickerThis weekend I’m at Fine Woodworking LIVE and, to be honest, it’s a tad weird. After being in the other camp for 22 years, it’s disconcerting. I feel like I’m crashing their party.

It’s all in my head. Everyone here is as sweet as milk, and I’m sure it will go fine. (Unless the FWW staff tells me I was brought on to be Christian Becksvoort’s manicurist and astrologer during the event.)

The drive today through Upstate New York was stunning – I got to see Spring occur in reverse. And it reminded me of a fateful drive I took on the same highway 13 years ago when John and I were starting this yet-to-be-named publishing company.

We were racking our brains for a good name for the company. I’m averse to naming things after me. I don’t have a big enough ego to shoulder that load. So “Hoffman & Schwarz Ltd.” was right out. Plus, it sounded like a German audio equipment company.

One of the other contenders was “Tried & True Press” (this was before Tried & True finishing products – I hope). It’s a good name, but I was taught to avoid clichés like the plague.

Another: “Said & Done Publications.” I like this one, but it didn’t have any connection to woodworking. If you’d like to have it, it’s yours.

“Straightedge Publishing.” The problem with this name was it could also be the parent company of a skateboarding magazine. Or a publisher of books for people who don’t consume alcohol or drugs.

And then there was “Sawset Redemption LLC.” (OK, I’m lying and I’ve had two beers.)

In any case, 13 years ago I remember muttering to myself during that long drive when “Lost Art Press” just popped out of my mouth. Nervous that I would forget it, I grabbed a pen and a business card and wrote the name down while using my steering wheel as a desk. This is illegal to do in 36 states, FYI.

So. Good day.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. If you are at Fine Woodworking LIVE, please do stop by and say hello. I’ll be the guy in the Prism Conference Room scraping Steve Latta’s corns.

The Card Table

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
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The grain-painted card table is a wonderful example of vernacular construction and decoration.


This is an excerpt from “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847)” by Joshua A. Klein. 

The grain-painted card table was a surprising new acquisition donated by a descendant of a Blue Hill family. The donor’s family understands that Fisher made the table for her ancestors, Lucy Stetson and William Wardwell, as a wedding gift in the 1830s. While Fisher’s production (or at least the journal’s record of it) had dramatically slowed by that point, it is, of course, possible that he made this piece.

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The graining was not complex on this table. There was only one application of red-brown pigment on top of a yellow base color.

The construction and graining is consistent with Fisher’s work, but because there are no other card tables attributed to him, no comparisons can be made. Based on the quantitative analysis of Federal period card tables by Benjamin Hewitt, this table could be safely given a northern New England attribution. The construction of the hinged “fly” rail, the square top with ovolo corners, and the horizontal laminations of ovolo corners suggest this may well have been made in Maine. Because Hewitt’s research does not include any documented Maine card tables, this determination is based on the proximity (both geographically and culturally) to Massachusetts.

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The underside of the table shows the construction: half-blind dovetails in the back, and mortise-and-tenons in the front, which are connected by the quarter-circle ovolo corners.

The construction of the ovolo corners were approached in many different ways, but Fisher might have learned the horizontal lamination method by examining a card table that is now in the museum’s collection during one of his many visits to parishioners’ houses.

The grain painting is much less realistic and more stylized than the wardrobe’s panels, but it is similar to the majority of his graining, such as is seen on his boxes. The paint, although originally bold in color, definitely has a New England plainness about it. One scholar has described Maine’s grain painting as “less flamboyant than that of Pennsylvania and New York State productions [and] usually has a reserved, northern air.”

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The simplicity of the card table’s graining is comparable to other Fisher work, such as this box.

Although Fisher never mentioned card tables in his journals, he does write about card playing several times. As a conservative Congregationalist, Fisher took gambling to be a serious sin. The Puritan warnings about squandering your resources and the danger of covetousness made a deep impact on his mind. Fisher recalled one occasion as a child when neighbor boys brought a pack of playing cards over for the evening, “the use of which was then forbidden by law. They played a little, and I attempted to play with them.” Although they tried to hide the cards in the morning, his uncle found them out. “He took me aside, questioned me seriously upon the subject, discoursed to me in a mild manner concerning the pernicious effects of gaming, and cautioned me to avoid it. When he had done, it was not my formal promise, but my secret determination never to take cards in hand to play with them again; and through preventing goodness to this day, I have never done it, and hope I never shall.” Fisher then credited “the interposition of Providence” for having “prevented [his] temporal and spiritual ruin.” This event had such a deep impact on him that he seized the opportunity to do the same for a group of children later in his life. It was when he and his family failed to reach their departing ship that the opportunity arose. Fisher recorded, “…[Our] wheelbarrow… on the way broke down and so delayed us that the vessel had hauled off before we could get our chests on board. My sons took a boat and conveyed them on board. By means of these embarrassments I was led to enter in the evening the cabin of a vessel at the wharf, where I found a circle of youths playing cards and gave them a calm, serious lecture upon the subject. The opportunity for this more than compensates for the embarrassment. Wonderful are the ways of Providence!”

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The ovolo corners were simply screwed to the front and side aprons. Also note the horizontal three-piece laminations that make up the corners.

Regardless of Fisher’s views on card playing, this furniture form was likely used for more than just games. Gerald Ward has noted how these tables were portable, versatile and inexpensive, and also functioned as “important elements of decoration … in the Federal domestic interior.”

— Meghan B.

That Rumor is Something I Can’t Do

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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I get a lot of odd email through my personal website, and most isn’t worth mentioning. But there’s one email I get every week that I want to put to bed. It goes like this:

Someone told me you host classes where people build a roubo bench for a week with you and take it home is that true

Sorry, no. It’s not true. We hold some classes at our storefront (complete list here), but I don’t teach much these days. And we don’t have the facilities to teach a workbench class.

I still love to build workbenches and research their history. But there’s no way I could manage a class like that in our little storefront. So if you see this rumor repeated out on the internet, would you mind stabbing it in the eyeball for me? I feel bad for the people who keep asking me with high hopes.

There are lots of people who teach workbench classes. You might ping Mark Hicks at Plate 11, who teaches some classes in his shop along those lines.

I’m flattered to be asked. But like I said, it ain’t me.

— Christopher Schwarz