Chair, c. 1910

This red-brown stained chair by Gebrüder Thonet captivates with its simple and perfectly shaped design. The five parallel bars on the curved backrest serve both as a reinforcement of the construction and as an estehtic feature. This felicitous marriage of functionality and style had been successfully pursued by Michael Thonet (1796–1871) and his successors since the 1850s. From 1876, this concept included the use of plywood parts. It was likely at the World Fair in Philadelphia, which Franz Thonet visited in his capacity as an official correspondent to the Austrian commission, that he was introduced to the use of cross-bonded veneers for chair seats. Back in Vienna, he tried this use of material for the first time in his chair no. 18. While chairs with wooden seats were initially rare, they increased markedly from the 1885/86 catalogue, and by 1914 made up 60 percent of all produced chairs.

Text Leopold Museum