Rare Model of a Thonet Arm Chair

Exe­cut­ed in beech and bent beech­wood, stained to resem­ble mahogany and fin­ished with shel­lac polish.

Back­rest designed with taper­ing round rods, framed by ele­gant­ly curved arm sup­ports; ergonom­ic seat; feet fit­ted with brass sabots and shaped stretchers.

Stamped on the seat frame and bear­ing orig­i­nal labels.

An espe­cial­ly ele­gant and rare mod­el of a Thonet arm­chair from the Art Deco period.

The Begin­ning of a Glob­al Enter­prise: ​“Gebrüder (Broth­ers) Thonet”:

Michael Thonet (1796 – 1871) was a pro­tégé of the Aus­tri­an State Chan­cel­lor and Prince von Met­ter­nich, who invit­ed him to Vien­na and also financed the jour­ney for him and his fam­i­ly. Met­ter­nich first encoun­tered Thonet’s work at the exhi­bi­tion of the Soci­ety of Friends of the Arts in Koblenz and was enthu­si­as­tic about the inno­v­a­tive spir­it that made Thonet’s cre­ations so excep­tion­al. Thus, in 1842, Michael Thonet left his home­town of Bop­pard in Ger­many with his fam­i­ly to live and work in Vien­na. A major focus of these ear­ly years in Vien­na was the fur­ther devel­op­ment of his patents.

In Vien­na, through the medi­a­tion of Prince von Met­ter­nich, he was com­mis­sioned by the archi­tect Peter Hubert Desvi­gnes to pro­duce fur­ni­ture for the Palais Liecht­en­stein. Desvi­gnes also encour­aged Thonet to present his prod­ucts at var­i­ous world exhi­bi­tions. As Carl Leistler (cab­i­net­mak­er and par­quet man­u­fac­tur­er) already held a gen­er­al con­tract for fur­ni­ture and floor­ing, Thonet worked on this com­mis­sion as a sub­con­trac­tor for Leistler.

Mag­nif­i­cent and high­ly elab­o­rate par­quet floors were pro­duced, as well as seat­ing fur­ni­ture in the style of the ​“Sec­ond Roco­co” for the Liecht­en­stein Palace. Already at the Lon­don World Exhi­bi­tion of 1851 — whose prepa­ra­tions brought Michael Thonet to Lon­don in 1850 — sev­er­al pro­to­type mod­els of Mod­el Series No. 5 were on display.

In Lon­don, Thonet pre­sent­ed for the first time an ensem­ble con­sist­ing of a chair, canapé, and arm­chair. The exhibitor list already men­tioned Thonet with six dif­fer­ent chair mod­els, two fau­teuils, one canapé, two tables, a sewing table, two read­ing tables, and two étagères.

From the suite shown at the World Exhi­bi­tion, he lat­er devel­oped the ser­i­al mod­els No. 9 and No. 5, which were offered side by side until the mid-1870s. In 1853, Michael Thonet found­ed the com­pa­ny Gebrüder Thonet togeth­er with his five sons, becom­ing the most suc­cess­ful fur­ni­ture man­u­fac­tur­er of the Indus­tri­al Age.

By shift­ing from the tech­nique of lam­i­nat­ing glued wood lay­ers to the new and inno­v­a­tive method of bend­ing sol­id round­wood using steam, Thonet achieved the break­through to indus­tri­al and ser­i­al pro­duc­tion. Sup­port­ed by an inter­na­tion­al sales and dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem, Thonet evolved into a glob­al­ly oper­at­ing enter­prise. The first known sales cat­a­logue of Gebrüder Thonet appeared in 1883, illus­trat­ing 219 mod­els across 21 pages.

A sec­ond cat­a­logue fol­lowed in 1886, and a third in 1888, already pre­sent­ing 339 dif­fer­ent mod­els on 30 pages. By 1911, the Gebrüder Thonet cat­a­logue fea­tured a range of 980 dif­fer­ent fur­ni­ture models.