Rare Thonet barber chair from the 1870s production, intact and marked

Rare Thonet barber high chair from the 1870s production, intact. With a burnt-in stamp and cartouche. History of the prestigious Thonet manufacture. In the years around 1830, Thonet carried out his experiments with veneer strips softened in boiling glue before inventing the "bentwood furniture". In 1842, Prince Metternich, impressed by the talent of the Rhenish cabinetmaker, called him to Vienna. Here, Michael Thonet dedicated himself, with his children, to making parquet floors and furniture for the Liechtenstein Palace and the Schwarzenberg Palace. With the creation of chair No. 4 for the Daum café on Kohlmarkt in Vienna, he quickly conquered the Viennese café scene, laying the foundations for the development of the furniture sector intended for the "community", i.e. public places. With the revolution of 1848, many people lost their jobs and found other employment in Thonet's new factories, where steam engines were in operation. Success came in 1859, when Michael's sons' company, Gebrüder Thonet, presented chair No. 14 in solid bentwood, the famous "Vienna straw chair" which is 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, embracing certain insights that were still in their infancy. From the very beginning, they presented their creations at industrial and craft exhibitions of the time. The multilingual catalogs of the company Gebrüder Thonet contributed to making the products known abroad, and they soon became bestsellers. Sales branches were thus established in neighboring countries as well as in more distant ones, eventually developing a distribution network for Thonet furniture all over the world. An innovative technique was developed to bend solid wood (hot steam), first by boiling the glue, then by moistening 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 carried on by his sons.The most valuable original Thonet furniture are those made in the "craft and design" phase of the mid-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 The Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Thonet GmbH Museum in Frankenberg, Hesse, have one of the largest collections of original Thonet chairs. In accordance with the provisions of the New Code of Cultural Heritage, the selling company provides, at the time of sale, a detailed written photographic guarantee of the originality and provenance of the works sold. The data with which the works are described and then contained in the written guarantees are express determinations resulting from accurate, in-depth and documented technical/historical/artistic investigations.