Antique Highback Chairs
A chair whose back stands tall relative to the seat, made for formal dining, fireside warmth or kitchen use, and sold singly, in pairs or in matched sets.
Antique Highback Chairs
The heading covers anything with a tall back, and in practice it resolves into three physical types: upholstered wing easy chairs, stick-built Windsor armchairs, and sets of joined dining chairs with high backs. Oak and mahogany are the woods named most often in titles, with walnut and yew behind them, and a few listings naming only the leather or chenille cover.
The single armchair dominates. The word appears in 22 of 68 titles, well clear of anything else, split fairly evenly between wing forms and Windsors. Dining seating is the other large block, at 16 titles, almost always offered as sets of four, six or eight, and once as a set of fourteen.
Tall backs became common in England from the later seventeenth century, when a high carved or caned back marked out formal hall and dining seating. The upholstered wing chair grew up alongside it as a draught excluder for the fireside, and the tall stick chair as kitchen and cottage seating. Revival versions of all of these run through the listings, labelled Carolean, William & Mary, Jacobean, Queen Anne, Gothic, Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
Dates run from 1700 to 1930, but only 27 of the 68 listings carry a clean year. "19th Century" is the single largest bucket at 21 listings, and the 1920s figure of 13 is swollen by dining sets all given as a flat 1920. Anything labelled 19th Century, Victorian or Georgian is the dealer's estimate rather than a documented date.
Where The Range Splits
With dining chairs, the count does most of the work. Sets of four sit low, sixes higher, eights higher again, and the one set of fourteen recorded on Sellingantiques, twelve singles and two carvers in mahogany, Queen Anne style, sits at the very top of everything sampled. A set that has stayed together is the scarcer thing.
Among the armchairs, wing form and early date carry the upper positions. The eighteenth century and George III wing chairs, and the leather-covered wing chairs, take up nearly all the top of the range, while Windsors cluster through the middle. Among those, yew wood turns up repeatedly in the middle and upper-middle, above unnamed timbers.
Carving lifts an oak chair. The higher-placed oak examples are the carved ones, from carved dining chairs to a pair given as c.1690. So does scale and oddity: titles flagging large size or unusual design sit above plain chairs of similar type. Children's versions and small novelty forms sit near the bottom.
Antique Highback Chairs Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for highback chairs, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
The top sale of the last year on Sellingantiques was a set of six highback Windsor kitchen dining chairs, sold in November 2025.
The Antique Highback Chairs Glossary
- Wing, wingback, winged
- An upholstered easy chair with side panels projecting at head height. All three spellings appear in titles, along with wing fireside armchair.
- Windsor
- A chair with legs and back spindles socketed into a solid seat. Eleven titles use the word, including one named pattern, the Oxford Windsor.
- Caned
- Back or seat filled with woven cane instead of upholstery or a solid panel. It shows up on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century chairs and the William & Mary style ones.
- Side chair
- A chair without arms, as opposed to the armchairs that account for a third of titles.
- Lambing chair
- A high country chair with a hood. One appears in the sample, in a child's size.
- Japanned
- A lacquered imitation of an Asian finish. One chair of circa 1700 is described this way.
Antique Highback Chairs: Frequently Asked Questions
How many chairs come in a typical set?
Sets of four, six and eight are the recurring counts in dining listings, with one set of seven and a single set of fourteen made up of twelve singles and two carvers.
The larger the set, the higher it sits in the range. Sets of four are the most affordable end of the dining block.
Which woods turn up most often?
Oak leads the titles at twelve, with mahogany at ten. Walnut and yew follow, and yew is the timber that recurs on Windsors through the middle and upper-middle of the range.
Some listings name no timber at all and describe the cover instead, such as burgundy brown leather or burnt orange chenille twill.
Are Windsor chairs part of this category?
Yes. Windsor appears in eleven of the sixty-eight titles, roughly a sixth of the listings, and sits alongside other country forms such as a lambing chair, a crofter chair and a kitchen armchair.
They concentrate in the middle of the range. A child's Windsor armchair is among the smaller pieces recorded.
What does a style label like Carolean mean here?
It describes character rather than date. Titles using Carolean style, William & Mary style, Jacobean style or Queen Anne style are pointing at carved and caned high-backed forms of an earlier period, made later.
These revival singles run as a steady minor thread through the listings, alongside Gothic, Art Nouveau and Art Deco labels.
Were highback chairs made outside England?
Almost all the sampled listings are English. Scotland is the only other named origin of any weight, appearing in a caned chair and an oak crofter chair.
One Continental walnut armchair is recorded. Beyond that, the archive is English.
How old are the earliest examples?
The dated field starts at 1700. The earliest pieces are a pair of carved oak highback chairs given as c.1690 and two caned chairs, one Scottish and one English, put at circa 1700.
The latest dated entry is an Art Deco armchair of 1930, which puts the whole span at roughly 240 years.