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Object Timeline
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1905 |
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1968 |
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Bentwood Rocking Chair Rocking Chair
This is a Rocking chair. It is dated ca. 1900 and we acquired it in 1968. Its medium is painted maple. It is a part of the Product Design and Decorative Arts department.
Bent into Shape
This chair was made in about 1900 in Catskill, New York, the region that inspired some of America’s greatest landscape painting. In the nineteenth century, artists, writers, and tourists travelled to the Catskills in awe of the falls, mountains, and landscape views, which Frederick Church among others so famously depicted. The rapid development of the national economy and its transportation systems brought people to the region to hike, fish, and enjoy the scenery. Natural resources also provided the raw material for manufacturers including many wood-using industries. Factories turned hardwoods and softwoods into baseball bats, furniture, barrels, railroad ties and other products. The industry peaked in the 1880s when more than forty furniture factories operated in the Catskills.
This rocker belongs to the category of bentwood furniture, a major innovation and fashion in furniture design of the nineteenth century that offered the valuable combination of strength and flexibility. Prior to World War I bentwood furniture used in the United States was primarily imported from factories in Austria, such as this rocking chair by Thonet also in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection. Bentwood furniture’s low-tech production process allowed amateurs or small-scale furniture makers, such as the ambitious craftsman of this chair, to emulate and expand upon these mass-produced forms. Softened through immersion in steam or boiling water, wood could then be molded into almost any shape with the aid of a press. The chip-carving evident on this fanciful chair’s central spine and curvaceous rungs allows us to see the hand of the maker.
This object was featured in our Object of the Week series in a post titled Bent into Shape.
This object was
donated by
George J. Fino.
It is credited Gift of George J. Fino.
- Landi Chair
- molded and punched aluminum, silver anodizing, rubber.
- Gift of Harry C. Sigman.
- 2013-21-34
- Kettle And Stand (England)
- copper, brass, ebony (kettle), wrought iron (stand).
- Museum purchase from the Decorative Arts Acquisition Fund.
- 1990-167-1-a/d
- Rocking Chair
- steamed, bent sawn oak slats, nailed to bent hickory wood bark-covered branches.
- 2014-44-1
Our curators have highlighted 2 objects that are related to this one.
- Table (USA)
- wood.
- Gift of the Hulla family in memory of Mark Wilson Hulla.
- 1987-37-1
- No. 4 Rocking Chair
- bent beechwood, woven caning.
- Museum purchase through gift of American Institute of Interior Designers.
- 1969-103-2
Its dimensions are
H x W x D: 119 x 58 x 61cm (46 7/8 x 22 13/16 x 24in.)
Cite this object as
Bentwood Rocking Chair Rocking Chair; USA; painted maple; H x W x D: 119 x 58 x 61cm (46 7/8 x 22 13/16 x 24in.); Gift of George J. Fino; 1968-143-1
This object was previously on display as a part of the exhibitions Botanical Expressions and Campana Brothers Select: Works from the Permanent Collection.
