High-back chair (pair with 1975.1.1999)

The type follows Hispano-Moresque aesthetics with an intricate inlay of precious materials such as various metals, ivory and bone, and mother-of-pearl applied to furniture forms from the Italian peninsula and especially Sicily and Spain.(1) The delicate inlay, reflecting a high level of local craftsmanship, has appealed to the tourist trade for centuries. A group of furniture including folding chairs, tables, and cabinets that originated from the Collection of Mulay ‘Abdu’l-Hafiz, sultan of Morocco (r. 1908 – 12), was auctioned in New York in 2004 and classified as North African, late nineteenth – early twentieth century.(2)

Catalogue entry from: Wolfram Koeppe. The Robert Lehman Collection. Decorative Arts, Vol. XV. Wolfram Koeppe, et al. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 243.


NOTES:
1. See Nos. 159, 160, 167. See also Odom, William M. A History of Italian Furniture from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y., 1918 – 19, vol. 1, fig. 33; The Viola E. Bray Renaissance Gallery. DeWaters Art Center, Flint Institute of Arts. Flint, Mich., 1963, n.p. (fall-front cabinet on the final page of the furniture section, where it is called an “important piece of Certosino work. . . about 1500”); Kurz, Otto. “Folding Chairs and Koran Stands.” In Islamic Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, edited by Richard Ettinghausen, pp. 299 – 314. New York, 1972, p. 304, fig. 9 (note that 27.225.2 is a nineteenth-century work; Kurz dates it to the sixteenth century); Španĕlské umĕlecké řemeslo, 1550 – 1650: Výstava uspořadaná v rámci projektu Rudolf II. a Praha. Exhibition, Uměleckoprůmyslove Muzeum, 1997. Catalogue by Pavel Štĕpanek. Prague, 1997, no. 51.
2. Sale, Christie’s, New York, 23 April 2004, lots 156 – 64.

Robert Lehman, New York