Charles Rohlfs

Annie I. Crawford, Buffalo, New York, 1902
Thence by descent to the present owners

Thinking Again about Rohlfs in 1902: A Recently Discovered Chair
Joseph Cunningham, PhD
Author, Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs

Few designers ever experienced a period of brilliant creativity parallel to the exquisitely short high-period of American furniture maker Charles Rohlfs which lasted roughly from 1898 to 1904. These six years of genius designs and virtuosic production marked a high-water mark in American design and established Rohlfs as an internationally known creator of what he terms “artistic furniture.” Ranging from some truly incredible ‘standard models’ to one-off masterpieces for his personal collection and special clients, the designs Rohlfs created in this masterful but contracted epoch stand as among the most important furniture made anywhere in the period around 1900.

The momentous acquisition by the Brooklyn Museum in 1960 of the first work to enter an American museum (a 1903 double candlestand) set public institutions on a systematic march that established Rohlfs as among the most widely collected and exhibited of any American designer. In the decades that followed, the artist’s son Roland Rohlfs donated iconic works to the Princeton University Art Museum, Max Palevsky contributed a stellar range masterful designs to Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Leeds Art Foundation donated the singular masterpiece Desk Chair to Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with gifts of excellent works to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Chazen Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art and Huntington Art Collections. 

The artist has become widely known through public collections and the traveling exhibition and monograph The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs and important new discoveries of notable works by the artist are exceedingly rare. Charles Rohlfs relished the blank canvas of chair design more than any other form and the Hall Chair offered here gives us the opportunity to reassess his experimentation in this form. The chair provokes one of the artist’s most intriguing paradoxes: the tension between rectilinear and curvilinear elements juxtaposed in a single work of art. The origin for the rectilinear aspects of Rohlfs work can be found as early as 1892, when he drew a crib for his son Roland (Artistic Furniture [AF], page 60) but the breakthrough in Rohlfs’ understanding of how this kind of restrained design could be paired with complex contours and the whiplash curves of the Art Nouveau style came a half-decade later with his development of the celebrated Hall Chair (AF 74) for the “Graceful Writing Set.”

The radical experimentation that engaged Rohlfs in wide ranging chair designs in his formative artistic moments led to the publication of “A Group of Unique Chairs” in the same August 1900 article in the Puritan that introduced the Graceful Writing Set (AF 75). Though two of the three chairs presented in that set are unremarkable Victorian models, one stands as an important precedent for the present lot. This exceptionally novel design (which Rohlfs seems to have made for or retained for his own use; AF 86, 202, 205) exhibits many divergent features but elements of its overall structure and especially its lower cross-stretchers are important precursors for the chair offered here. The overall structure is quite plain but the lower cross stretchers dart in from tongue-in-groove joints at the legs to a swirl of fretwork at the center, above which a vertical support ascends to meet the seat framing. The seat and backrest were made from leather straps, and scrolled finials completed the design at the top. The lower stretchers converging from the legs specifically presage Rohlfs’ arced stretchers on the present lot. Neither design is known to have been repeated.

That seminal article in the Puritan introduced a key set of celebrated Rohlfs models including the Table with Scroll Decorations (AF 42), Coal Hod (AF 89), Corner China Cabinet (AF 87), Table with Fretwork Screens (AF 122), and Table with Fretted Stretchers (AF 138). The next dramatic step toward the development of the present lot came in the form of the Cube Chair with Medallions published in Art Education in January 1901. Like the masterful corner chairs that formed the ‘screens’ around a table, the medallions seem in that design to have been floating by; simply lodged artistically in the gridded chair frame.

The present lot is not known known to a have been published around the time of its making in 1902, but noted critic Sadakichi Hartmann (under the pseudonym “Sidney Allan”) illustrated the chair a decade later in his important article “Charles Rohlfs: A Worker in Wood,” (Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, February 1912, p. 69-76). That article presented a panoply of masterworks by Rohlfs including the well-known Folding Screen in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and Standing Desk discussed below.

This lot presents as a largely conventional hall or desk chair, whose orthodoxy is questioned by its complex schemes of fretwork and carved ornament. The dominant feature of the chair is, of course, the dramatically pierced and carved backrest which exhibits one of Rohlfs’ hallmark artistic gestures: the simultaneous evocation of both human rib-cage shapes and their similarity to lyre, lute and related musical instrument cases. This general form is reticulated with ovals, trefoils, and at center a root-stem-flower all common in Rohlfs’ work from this period. The form of this board calls to mind the center vertebral carved plank of the 1901 Stand now in the collection of the Newark Museum of Art (AF 158-159). That table form features a single arced stretcher set low between the legs, related to the double-arc stretcher of the present chair.

Above the backrest, Rohlfs utilized a shaped and carved crest with three pierced ovals, two smaller ones with sculpted nobs, the larger with a curled finger at center. This innovation foiled his earlier Hall Chair model with a flat crest and related to the breakthrough redesign of that form in 1902. Despite having made and sold over ten models of the Hall Chair with straight crests, Rohlfs returned to the design in the same year the present lot was made, reshaping the crest with raised curves at the center and corners and adding carving around the center oval. It is unknown whether Rohlfs created the present lot and then was inspired to rework his earlier design for the Hall Chair or in the context of that redesign he used a similar plan for this new chair form.

One aspect he chose not to redesign in that version of the Hall Chair was the finials, which in the present lot were turned 180 degrees and made into double-scrolls rather than single spirals. The move to align the finials parallel to the chair sides rather than the seat front and crest is disarming. Paired with the dramatic cant of the chair back and whiplash curves of the lower stretchers, the orientation of finials heightens the sense that the chair is in motion.

Aspects of the pierced and carved backrest, crest, supports and moldings harken to another 1902 masterwork, the Standing Desk (AF168). Rib-cage and vertebral imagery dominate the carved panels of that desk and pierced elements in the present lot mimic the solid nodes around which carved reverberations tremble. Because the backrest is elaborately carved on both the front and back, we can speculate that the chair was more likely a desk chair than a hall chair, which would have generally only been seen from the front. It is not known whether this chair might have originally been paired with that desk, but it is worth noting that the Standing Desk likely stayed in the Buffalo area (where it was found nearly a century after it was made) as it was retrofitted with a mahogany interior in the upper gallery two years after it was made and redated 1904.

The present lot also traces its lineage 1902 Buffalo, where it was acquired directly from Charles Rohlfs by noted regional artist Annie Isabel Crawford (1856-1942). Part of Buffalo’s artistic community that flourished in the context of the Arts & Crafts Movement circa 1900, Crawford created pleasing paintings, made prints and taught as a master printmaker. Her father, John Crawford (1828-1893), was a successful business owner whose firm “John Crawford & Sons Monument Works Company” supplied ornate headstones to elite members of Buffalo’s most notable families, many of which can be found in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery.

If those elements connect the chair to the Standing Desk, the inventive framing below the seat connect it back to a Library Table made a few years earlier with brilliant bright green finish (AF 130). The moldings applied below the seat are typical of Rohlfs’ singular ability to use subtle gestures to drape simple forms in lavishly carved whiplash curves that in turn demarcate fascinating and disconcerting negative spaces that shift as one rounds the object. The centers of each of these bands of carved oak feature asymmetric finger-finials which appear to descend down into the wood only to reemerge as small stubs. Even closer to the decorative motifs of the green-stained desk are the carved rear backrest supports that specifically mimic the corbels and other decoration applied to the Library Table.

It is always exciting when a new work by Charles Rohlfs emerges, but especially so when it bears such important connections to other works that give it context and such significant associations to Buffalo, the place it was made, in 1902, one of the artist’s best years of production.