Four dining chairs
Attributed to Henry van de Velde
Solid oak, wicker upholstery and the textile covers replaced. In visually pristine condition, the textile covers replaced. H 100, W 45, D 47 cm.
Probably produced by Fa. Dünnebeil, Weimar, or August Bosse, Weimar, 1904.
Similar chairs were used in the furnishings of Haus Schede in Herdecke an der Ruhr in 1904/05. Henry van de Velde came to this commission through Karl Ernst Osthaus, who was a friend of the owner. For this design, he probably reworked an earlier idea realized in dining room chairs for his 1894 sales catalogue, namely the lug carrying handles on the high backrests. The early chair illustrated in Föhl/Neumann still shows the curved backrest with wide rounded openings on both sides of the center strut. A reduced version was produced ten years later.
The chairs are upholstered in the "Tula" fabric, which was based on a design by Henry van de Velde from 1902 and was reconstructed by the silk manufacturer Eschke Crimmitschau. The jacquard woven damask was originally made of cotton, wool and silk, and original pattern samples in various colourways can be found in numerous museum collections, including the German Textile Museum in Krefeld (ZV 1982/388).
Provenance
From an important European private collection.
Literature
For more about the house in Wetter an der Ruhr, see Osthaus, Van de Velde. Leben und Schaffen des Künstlers. Hagen 1920, p. 28.
Cf. a chair in the Victoria & Albert Museum London, acc. no. C.22839.
This cover published in Föhl/ Neumann (ed.), Henry van de Velde. Werksverzeichnis II Textilien, Leipzig 2014, p. 146ff., no. II.2.2.12.
Cf. ibid. II.2.2.1., for a chair in the dining room with the tapestry cover from Scherrebek.