Barley Twist Hunzinger Armchair

Description

An Aesthetic Movement armchair, circa 1890, attributed to Brooklyn furniture maker and designer, George Jakob Hunzinger, having barley twist turned frame with padded back and seat, recently reupholstered in Belgian linen.
George Hunzinger (1835-98) A German immigrant from a family of cabinet-makers, Hunzinger was the subject of a retrospective exhibition “The Furniture of George Hunzinger: Invention and Innovation in Nineteenth-Century America” held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1997. In reviewing the exhibition, Roberta Smith of the New York Times celebrated Hunzinger’s forward-looking chairs for their transparency and strength in design and construction, while predicting modernism’s emphasis on abstraction and visual austerity. The exhibition, she wrote, “showed furniture shedding its Victorian padding like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.”