George Hunzinger Chair Late 19th Century Hunzinger Walnut Side Chair, Outstanding Museum Quality

Oustanding example of a George Hunzinger Side chair. Identical chair (in red fabric) is on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Chair frame is mahogany with ebony accents and cream uphostery.

That George Hunzinger (1835-98) is not a household name like Michael Thonet or even Charles Eames, owes as much to the vagaries of fashion as to any shortcomings on Hunzinger’s part.

A German immigrant from a family of cabinet-makers, Hunzinger was a Victorian-era inventor (he held 21 patents) and designer whose commercially successful body of work embraced machine production methods and materials.

Regarded by historians and critics as a proto-modernist, Hunzinger was the subject of a retrospective exhibition “The Furniture of George Hunzinger: Invention and Innovation in Nineteenth-Century America” held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1997.

In a review of this exhibition, Roberta Smith of the New York Times lauded Hunzinger’s most innovative and forward-looking chairs for their transparency and structural rigor, and for offering an early glimmer of modernism’s emphasis on abstraction and visual austerity.

The exhibition, she wrote, “showed furniture shedding its Victorian padding like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.” This example retains it's original uphostery and finish in excellent condition. Slight fading of fabric and finishes consistant with age.

Marked Hunzinger on back leg "pat'd March 30, 1869" with machine-inspired detailing, circa 1870s. Chair measures 32-1/2" tall, 20" wide, and 17" deep.