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...

This rocking chair was made in Indiana, where Amish first settled in the 1840s, and boasts hickory twigs bent to form its symmetrical sides and oak slats evenly arranged to form its seat. The dramatic contours of this chair ensure that it is at once attractive and comfortable. This graceful form is achieved by bending...

We can define as “rare” an artist whose work is hard to reach or to see, because there are only few creations that remain from him, and because the tracks that could explain most of them are lost. Trying to reach them becomes a true quest for the art lover. Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) was such...

What did George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, General Knox, and Benjamin Franklin have in common? Windsor chairs. These chairs were first produced in England in the very first years of the 18th century. Although many folk tales surround the origin of the name (including some involving George III caught in a rain storm), it is likely...

One of the twentieth century’s most renowned furniture makers, George Nakashima (1905–1990) is remembered for his reverence for natural materials. With its silky, nuanced grain and soft, contoured edges, this massive sideboard embodies his profound interest in the organic expressiveness of wood. Nakashima was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington to first-generation Japanese immigrants. After earning a master’s degree in architecture...

This chest, by twentieth-century American designer/craftsman Wendell Castle is an outstanding example of the American studio furniture movement. Commissioned as a stereo cabinet, it is a variant of a blanket chest he crafted in 1968 that is now  housed in the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. Castle’s work is...