Practical and rare Thonet desk chair, marked and complete. Austria, approx. 1870.

Practical and rare Thonet desk chair. Austria, around 1870. Made of solid beech wood curved by steam, with a fan-shaped backrest. Vienna straw seat. Limited series production phase of around 1870, much rarer than the subsequent one from the 1900s. In excellent condition, with patina. Original marks and cartouche of the Thonet manufactory. Work close to the style of Joseph Hoffman. History of the prestigious Thonet manufactory. In the years around 1830, Thonet conducted his experiments with strips of veneer softened in boiling glue before inventing "bentwood furniture." In 1842, Prince Metternich, impressed by the talent of the Rhenish cabinet maker, called him to Vienna. Here, Michael Thonet dedicated himself, with his sons, to creating parquet floors and furniture for the Liechtenstein Palace and the Schwarzenberg Palace. With the creation of chair No. 4 for the Daum café on the Kohlmarkt in Vienna, he quickly conquered the Viennese café scene, laying the groundwork for the development of the furniture sector intended for the "community," or public spaces. With the revolution of 1848, many people lost their jobs and found another in the new Thonet factories, where steam engines were in operation. Success came in 1859, when the company Gebrüder Thonet, owned by Michael's sons, presented chair No. 14 in solid bentwood, the famous "Vienna straw chair," now considered one of the icons of design history. The Thonet brothers quickly understood the need to integrate new trends and technical developments into their work, adopting certain insights that were still in their embryonic state. From the beginning, they presented their creations at the industrial and artisanal exhibitions of the time. The multilingual catalogs of the company Gebrüder Thonet helped to publicize the products abroad, which quickly became bestsellers. Thus, sales branches were established in neighboring countries as well as in more distant ones, eventually developing a distribution network of Thonet furniture worldwide. An innovative technique was developed to curve the solid wood (steam heated), first by boiling the glue, then by humidifying it with steam, generated by an autoclave, and then giving it the desired curvature in metal forms and making it rigid again by drying it in ovens. This latter procedure was then patented in 1842. Michael Thonet died in Vienna in 1871, and the business was continued by his sons. The most valuable original Thonet furniture is that made in the "craft and design" phase of the full nineteenth century. The first models made around the middle of the century, first in Boppard, then in Moravia, are reference objects in the history of design and furniture and of museum relevance. The production of the last third of the 1800s retains a significant artistic - collecting interest, as production was still curated, limited in number, and with a technique similar to the prototypes. The Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Thonet GmbH Museum in Frankenberg, Hesse, possess one of the most extensive collections of original Thonet chairs. In accordance with the provisions of the New Code of Cultural Heritage, the selling company provides, simultaneously with the sale, a detailed written photographic guarantee of originality and provenance of the sold works. The data with which the works are described and then contained in the written guarantees are express determinations, the result of accurate, thorough, and documented technical/historical/artistic investigations.