Artist Profile

  • joseph henzey
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  • joseph henzey

Joseph Henzey

  • Lived:
  • 1743-1796
  • Worked:
  • Philadelphia, PA
  • Style:
  • Windsor Chairmaker
  • Joseph Henzey was a competent, successful Quaker craftsman.  Henzey was born about 1743 and p[robably completed his apprenticeship in the mid 1760s.  The earliest record of his working career occurs in the 1767 assessment, which indicates that he paid only a 2s. head tax because he was both unmarried and without taxable property. He was either beginning his own business or working as a journeyman.  Henzey began to sell Windsor furniture on his own account by 1772, when he married and also took two apprentices.  Both boys, Isaac Covert and David Stackhouse, the latter a Bucks County Quaker, later established their own chairmaking businesses.  By the early 1790s Henzey was also a steward of Pennsylvania Hospital.  At Henzey's death in 1796, Quaker cabinetmaker Daniel Trotter provided his coffin. 

    [Excerpt from American Windsor Chairs by Nancy Goyne Evans, p.89]

    Click here to read the entire article from Herb Lapp written for the American Furniture Society in 2008.

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