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Lot Essay
"The design and fittings of these chairs are equally good and elegant, and certainly we have never tested a more easy and commodious article of household furniture."
-The Crystal Palace Exhibition Illustrated Catalogue (Reprint, London, 1970), p. 152. Cited in Peirce, Art & Enterprise: American Decorative Art, 1825-1917 The Virginia Carroll Crawford Collection (High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1999), p. 162.
The above praise for the centripetal chair was just one of many favorable reviews of Thomas E. Warren's innovative design patented in 1849. In addition to its display at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, the chair was shown at the 1850 Twentieth Annual Exhibition of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where it received a "second premium" award. The chair's interlacing scrollwork and rounded back bears a close affinity to John Henry Belter's patented designs of the same era. However, as the above review indicates, the chair was both attractive and comfortable. Integrated into the rococo aesthetic, the spring mechanism allowed its sitter to swivel and recline with ease.
The chair's maker, the American Chair Company was primarily a manufacturer of railway-car seating that had similar devices designed to absorb shocks and the centripetal chair was one of the company's earliest household products. Located in Troy, New York, the company was ideally situated at a railway hub and in the region's center for cast-iron production (see Peirce, pp. 162 and Davidson and Stillinger, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The American Wing (New York, 1985), fig. 288, pp. 182-184; for the development of cast-iron domestic furniture in America, see Berlin, "An important rosewood and cast-iron gueridon attributed to Duncan Phyfe and Sons," Antiques (May 2000), pp. 770-777).
With its original painted decoration largely intact and fitted with an early, possibly original, upholstery scheme, the chair offered here is a rare survival of the form. Particularly subject to wear is the chair's polychrome pictorial painted on the reverse of the back. Depicting a Gothic-style mansion, the scene may be based upon one of the many large homes lying along the banks of the Hudson River. In various states of survival, other examples of the centripetal chair are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the High Museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian and the Hermitage (for another example in a private collection, see Bishop, Centuries and Styles of the American Chair, 1640-1970 (New York, 1972), p. 368).
-The Crystal Palace Exhibition Illustrated Catalogue (Reprint, London, 1970), p. 152. Cited in Peirce, Art & Enterprise: American Decorative Art, 1825-1917 The Virginia Carroll Crawford Collection (High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1999), p. 162.
The above praise for the centripetal chair was just one of many favorable reviews of Thomas E. Warren's innovative design patented in 1849. In addition to its display at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, the chair was shown at the 1850 Twentieth Annual Exhibition of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where it received a "second premium" award. The chair's interlacing scrollwork and rounded back bears a close affinity to John Henry Belter's patented designs of the same era. However, as the above review indicates, the chair was both attractive and comfortable. Integrated into the rococo aesthetic, the spring mechanism allowed its sitter to swivel and recline with ease.
The chair's maker, the American Chair Company was primarily a manufacturer of railway-car seating that had similar devices designed to absorb shocks and the centripetal chair was one of the company's earliest household products. Located in Troy, New York, the company was ideally situated at a railway hub and in the region's center for cast-iron production (see Peirce, pp. 162 and Davidson and Stillinger, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The American Wing (New York, 1985), fig. 288, pp. 182-184; for the development of cast-iron domestic furniture in America, see Berlin, "An important rosewood and cast-iron gueridon attributed to Duncan Phyfe and Sons," Antiques (May 2000), pp. 770-777).
With its original painted decoration largely intact and fitted with an early, possibly original, upholstery scheme, the chair offered here is a rare survival of the form. Particularly subject to wear is the chair's polychrome pictorial painted on the reverse of the back. Depicting a Gothic-style mansion, the scene may be based upon one of the many large homes lying along the banks of the Hudson River. In various states of survival, other examples of the centripetal chair are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the High Museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian and the Hermitage (for another example in a private collection, see Bishop, Centuries and Styles of the American Chair, 1640-1970 (New York, 1972), p. 368).