The Hendrickson Family Pair of Queen Anne Paint-Decorated Side Chairs, Daniel Hendrickson, Jr. (1723-1788), Middletown, Monmouth County, New Jersey, circa 1780

The chair with an unpainted rush seat:

Daniel Hendrickson (1723 - 1788) of Middletown, Monmouth County;

to his son Hendrick Hendrickson (1758 - 1840);

to his daughter Jane Hendrickson Hendrickson (1792 - 1875);

to her daughter Sarah Hendrickson Longstreet (1826 - 1888);

to her son Garret D. Longstreet (1865 - 1942);

to his daughter Sarah Matilda Longstreet Holmes (1893 - 1942);

to her daughter Adeline Holmes Lubkert (1916 - 2016), Holmdel, New Jersey;

Point Pleasant Antique Emporium, Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, Estate of Adeline Holmes Lubkert, October 7, 2017.

The chair with its original painted rush seat:

Daniel Hendrickson (1723 - 1788) of Middletown, Monmouth County;

to his son Hendrick Hendrickson (1758 - 1840);

to his daughter Jane Hendrickson Hendrickson (1792 - 1875);

to her daughter Adelia Hendrickson Carson (1828 - 1911);

to her daughter Miss Elizabeth W. Carson (1863 - 1934).

Mrs. William C. Riker (1908-1970), Rumson, New Jersey, President of the Monmouth County Historical Association (1950-1967), as well as a collector and longtime resident of Holmdel;

to his daughter, Audrey Riker;

Sotheby's, New York;

Joe Hammond, Moultonborough, New Hampshire. Curator at the Monmouth County Historical Association, as well as a collector and scholar.

Point Pleasant Antique Emporium advertisement, Antiques and the Arts Weekly, October 6, 2017, p. 65;

Leslie and Peter Warwick, Love At First Sight: Discovering Stories About Folk Art & Antiques Collected by Two Generations & Three Families, (New Jersey: 2022), pp. 117-20, fig. 231a-b, 232a-b, 233-236.

This important pair of floral decorated ‘fiddleback’ chairs from a single set that descended in the Hendrickson family of Monmouth County, New Jersey. They were orignally made for Daniel Hendrickson, Jr. (1723-1788) of Middletown, Monmouth County, New Jersey. He was the youngest son of Daniel Hendrickson Sr. from Flatbush, Long Island who arrived in 1693 to become the first permanent settler of Holland Road, Middletown, now part of Holmdel. Daniel Hendrickson Jr. inherited the family farm, which he ultimately expanded to more than 800 acres. 

Hendrickson Jr. was an enterprising man; running a stud farm, a stable for race horse training, a tanyard, a cordwaining factory, a gristmill, a pantile, brickworks, an earthenware pottery, a distillery, and a lumber business. He built two sailing vessels and traded in ports from Nova Scotia to Curacao, sometimes in partnership with Gerardus Duyckinck and Alexander Watson, the nephew of the artist John Watson. He was the author and publisher of a religious pamphlet in Dutch. He was so active in the Dutch Reformed Church that he was nicknamed “Domine Daniel”. In 1752 he had a pipe organ installed in his house on Holland Road and he owned a spinet and a violin.

Hendrickson also became an accomplished artist. He painted large and small portraits of his family and friends, and also engaged in ornamental work such as painting a tavern sign, decorating a pew door, providing valence patterns for a near neighbor, and renewing the finishes on his minister's chaise. In an entry dated 25 July 1763, Hendrickson's ledger at Rutgers University Alexander Library Special Collections indicates that he billed his cousin Cornelius A. Covenhoven 2 pounds, 4 shillings and 7 pence for "Chair Work." A detailed listing of pigments applied to the chairs included, "1/2 an oz. Prussian blue, 1/2 an oz. Yellow pink, 1/2 an oz. Blue frost, 2 books leaf gold, a Quart and pint of lintseed oyle @ 9s pr gn, to a lb of White Lead, and To 1 1/2 lb. Spanish Brown @ 6d." After itemizing all of the supplies involved, Hendrickson charged Covenhoven one pound for "My work in painting and gilding." Those chairs would have been very colorful, the Spanish brown no doubt being the ground pigment. Daniel Hendrickson died intestate in 1788. But a surviving draft will seems to have been generally followed. In it he left to his daughter Catherine (1754 - 1835) "the half a dozen of chairs," along with a lengthy list of other furnishings, paintings, provisions, and spaces in the house for her use as long as she is unmarried. Catherine remained single, and when she died in 1835 she left "6 green chairs" to her niece Catherine Hendrickson Lane. The background color of the chairs is a dark green under varnish that has turned brown. An inventory of Hendrick's possessions taken on 28 January 1841 included "6 fiddle back chairs" valued at $3.00 that were located in the northwest room upstairs. Tragically, his house, built in 1723, was was torn down about 2010.

A paper label on the underside of the woven rush seat of a third chair from the set is in the collection of the Monmouth County Historical Association is inscribed Elizabeth W. Carson / 7 Broad Street / Freehold. The chair was described in Association collection records as "1 Chair. Painted Dutch. from Hendrickson family." Miss Carson was a great- great- granddaughter of Daniel Hendrickson (1723 - 1788).

Three other works by Hendrickson contain depictions of flowers. They are: a portrait of his daughter Catherine Hendrickson (1754 - 1835) now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; a painted door removed in 1927 from the Cornelius Covenhoven House in Holmdel, Monmouth County and now in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York; and a second painted door removed from the Wyckoff House at Six Mile Run, Franklin Township, Somerset County, now owned by the Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.