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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I recently purchased an Emerson & Son furniture catalog from 1893 which I will make available on the catalog page in future. What caught my eye in the catalog was the above pictured table.  As I said to Paul Tucker in an email, it is very “Merklenesque”, as in the Merklen Brothers.  Hopefully, some of you have read enough here on Rare Victorian to know not to even whisper the name George Hunzinger in association with tables such as these.  He did not corner the market on spiral furniture as is sometimes thought and he did not make tables that resembled these that I will show you in this post. Continue Reading »

Whoa.  It has taken me 5 days to isolate an issue on this blog that prevented me from creating new posts.  It is easier to troubleshoot problems where nothing works at all then to troubleshoot the case where everything works on the site except adding new posts.  It has not been fun and has broken my rhythm.   While I get my mojo back, here’s a post I had waiting in the wings …

I personally own the chair that is represented by the design in the 1869 Hunzinger patent application. He made seemingly countless, sometimes crazy-looking variations of this chair but it feels kinda fun to have a chair that is 95% the same as the patent drawing from 1869. Continue Reading »

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 »