Thonet

The displayed chair is one of the early prototypes of bentwood furniture, seen as synonymous with the name of Michael Thonet (1796-1817) from Boppard in Rhineland. In 1836, the inventor made a chair from glued veneer slats shaped by hot steam. He received the first patent for his invention in Paris in 1841. Michael Thonet's talent was noticed by the Austrian foreign minister and Chancellor Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. At his persuasion, in 1842, Thonet moved to Vienna. Employed by Carl Leister's company, in 1842-1847, he worked as a carpenter on the new decor of Aloys Liechtenstein's Baroque palace (Vienna, Bankgasse 9). At the same time, Thonet continued his own experiments with bentwood. At the 1851 World's Fair in London, he showed a new model, made of heat-bent rosewood rods, which was awarded a bronze medal. In his company, which he established in 1849, the inventor gradually replaced the glued layers of wood with beech rods. This technology gave a new direction to the development of bentwood furniture known to this day. The displayed chair is one of Thonet's early products. Made of glued layers of bent beechwood, this walnut-veneered piece of furniture was located in the drawing-room of Alfred I Potocki's apartment in the early 1860s. Presumably, the owner of Łańcut met Michael Thonet early in the Viennese milieu and encountered his glued bentwood chairs. Moreover, the younger brother of Aloys Liechtenstein, Franz, was the husband of Julia Potocka - the daughter of Alfred, Łańcut's first Lord Ordynat. Edited by Teresa Bagińska-Żurawska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9243-3967