A Set of Six French Black Leather Dining Chairs by Jacques Adnet c.1950

SOLD
Origin: French
Period: Mid 20thC
Provenance: Ex; Wyeth, New York
Date: c.1950-55
Height: 32” or 17.5” at seats
Width: 18.5”
Depth: 20” (all each)

The set of six stunning black leather chairs by renowned French designer Jacques Adnet (1900-1984), each having black metal frames terminating in brass sectional feet and adorned with brass ball finials, the quality leather seats and backrests being hand-stitched in the characteristic Adnet contrast stitching to X-shaped stretchers and surviving from the middle of the twentieth century.

The chairs are mainly in good order with no replacement parts and the leather remains original. There are some light scuffs and four chairs have small tears here and there as photographed which could easily be remedied. They have a nice craquelure and some of the metal is very lightly rusted. We have left the finals and feet uncleaned but have administered oil to the leather which has brought them up rather well.

One of the most elegant and innovative 20th-century French furniture designers, Jacques Adnet created a simple, unadorned signature style that is both trim and vigorous. He began his career in the heyday of the Art Deco era, and in the 1950s, in association with Hermès, created chairs, lamps, desks and other pieces that employed slender metal frames clad in stitched saddle leather. With such furnishings, Adnet brought a fashion sensibility to design and decor that had not been seen since the 1920s prime of the great Paris couturier-decorator Paul Poiret.

Adnet was born in a provincial town in Burgundy, where he studied design before moving, along with his twin brother, Jean, to Paris to study at the École des Arts Décoratifs. After their graduation in the early 1920s, the brothers were hired to work in the decorative-arts atelier of the department store Galeries Lafayette, under the direction of Maurice Dufrêne, an Art Deco master who developed a singularly robust and opulent style. Both Adnets showed their work at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes — the design fair from which the term Art Deco is derived.

In 1928, Jacques Adnet took charge of the struggling La Compagnie des Arts Français, a decorative-arts firm founded by Louis Süe and André Mare that created modern furnishings that bore traces of 18th-century styling. Adnet immediately took the company in a different direction. He developed a simple lithe and lean look that incorporated industrial materials such as metal and glass, along with exotic woods and finishes such as parchment and sharkskin. Adnet’s furniture begs to be described in terms of personalities: charming faux-bamboo side tables, suave chrome lighting, urbane club chairs. His most noted pieces — sleek metal frames wrapped in Hermès leather — have a character all their own: Smooth, elegant and self-assured, they inhabit a room with the same wit and grace as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve.

Very hard indeed to find a set of six, wonderfully sculptural, and of course, highly prized.
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