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Lot Essay
Samuel Gragg received a patent for his innovative bentwood fancy-painted "elastic chair" on August 31, 1808. Shaped using heat and moisture, many of these chairs are in the ancient Greek klismos form popular in the early 1800s, in part due to Thomas Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807). Gragg's innovative manufacturing technique was a precursor to those developed later by nineteenth-century furniture makers Michael Thonet and John Henry Belter.
Gragg is known to have made three sets of bentwood furniture, according to Patricia Kane's article "Samuel Gragg: His Bentwood Fancy Chairs," in the Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 33 (Autumn 1971). An armchair matching this one, published in Dean Fales's American Painted Furniture and currently in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, was previously in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Montgomery. Several side chairs from the Montgomery collection and probably belonging to the same original set are housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Winterthur Museum, and the Yale Art Gallery. The Henry Ford Museum also has a side chair with painted peacock feather decoration and goat-hoof feet, and another was sold in these rooms in the John Gordon Collection of Folk Americana sale on Friday, January 15 and Tuesday, January 19, 1999. For further illustration and discussion of Gragg's bentwood furniture, see Patricia E. Kane, 300 Years of American Seating Furniture (Boston, 1976), pp. 183-184, figs. 163, 163a, 163b.
Gragg is known to have made three sets of bentwood furniture, according to Patricia Kane's article "Samuel Gragg: His Bentwood Fancy Chairs," in the Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 33 (Autumn 1971). An armchair matching this one, published in Dean Fales's American Painted Furniture and currently in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, was previously in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Montgomery. Several side chairs from the Montgomery collection and probably belonging to the same original set are housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Winterthur Museum, and the Yale Art Gallery. The Henry Ford Museum also has a side chair with painted peacock feather decoration and goat-hoof feet, and another was sold in these rooms in the John Gordon Collection of Folk Americana sale on Friday, January 15 and Tuesday, January 19, 1999. For further illustration and discussion of Gragg's bentwood furniture, see Patricia E. Kane, 300 Years of American Seating Furniture (Boston, 1976), pp. 183-184, figs. 163, 163a, 163b.