George Hunzinger furniture fans will probably be interested to see this chair design by him based on the 1869 brace patent. This is not a common form and I personally haven’t seen one in the past. You can see the chair without arms in the Hunzinger book on page 66.

Of interest to me are the ebonized touches in the incising and in the crest as well as the rear leg shape.
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Carlo Bugatti’s Art Nouveau furniture designs look more like they were designed for Batman’s home than for the homes of the turn of the 19th century when they were made (the firescreen above was is circa 1900).  Paul Tucker tells me that indeed Bruce Wayne’s bedroom furniture in one of the recent Batman movies was made by Bugatti, though I could not find a screen capture to show here.

If you are not already familiar with Carlo Bugatti, you may be at least familiar with his son Ettore’s car company that bears the family’s surname.  It’s not surprising that the car designs were not just functional but also works of art.  Carlo’s father was architect and sculptor Giovanni Luigi Bugatti, so design ran deep in the family roots.

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Usually when I do these antique Victorian furniture posts I post an image or so and accompany it with the brief research that I have done. I’m going to do it backwards this time.  I am posting the image first without having done any research and let those in the Rare Victorian community who are fans of Herter Brothers and the Aesthetic Movement sniff around in parallel with me and contribute their thoughts via the comments section below.

I receive emails regularly from site visitors wondering what furniture they have and which Victorian-era cabinetmaker produced it. The chair above is part of a 3-piece Aesthetic Movement parlor set that was passed down in the family from a visitor’s grandparents who purchased it around 1911 when they married. Along with it came the story passed down by grandma that it was designed by the famous architect Stanford White.  She also suggests by the floral design on the skirt that it could have been made by the Herter Brothers.

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Sorry if this series of posts is hitting the press slowly, but that is intentional as I am getting new information real-time and I want to be sure that you get it as it rolls in.  As we’ve been exploring in the past two posts (Part I, and Part II), we’re trying to determine if Zeke Feldhaus’ chair was made by George Hunzinger.

Lookie what we have here.  It seems that, surprise, surprise, the  chair in the Bruschke & Ricke catalog which appeared to leverage the Hunzinger brace patent from 1869 happens to be a Hunzinger-manufactured chair all along.  Thanks to Rare Victorian reader John Himes sharing his with us, we can show a real-life instance of the “Reception Chair” in the Bruschke & Ricke catalog with a Hunzinger stamp on it.

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Continuing from where the last post left off,we were trying to determine if an unlabeled chair that Zeke Feldhaus recently purchased was produced by George Hunzinger due to the patent-protected brace design (very bottom image) in the chair or whether another manufacturer either infringed on his patent or perhaps had licensed it.

Zeke had also ran into another instance of the chair which has a variation in the back splat but is certainly from the same manufacturer.   I wrote the owner to ask how they came to the conclusion that it was a Hunzinger and learned that it was based on word of mouth from the prior owner as well as some dealers who had seen the chair. Continue Reading »