Gebrüder Thonet was an exhibitor at the 1862 World’s Fair in London, where the company presented not only chairs, armchairs, canapés, and tables, but also its first Rocking Chair. In both appearance and function, the model was clearly intended as a piece of furniture for middle-class parlours and thus attests to Thonet’s strategy of opening its product range up to encourage new groups of buyers.
The Model has a caned seat and backrest supported by two bentwood rockers, one on each side, each made of five rods of solid, elaborately bent beech. Thonet could not have dared to develop such a model until the technique of bending solid wood had been fully mastered. An 1866 Thonet catalogue page lists the model as Rocking Chair No. 1, indicating that it was one of the company’s serially produced models. The chair’s shape could well have been inspired by a metal rocking chair made by the Birmingham-based metal furniture manufacturer R.W. Winfield and exhibited at the 1851 World’s Fair in London.
The bentwood furniture manufacturers J. & J. Kohn, who were Gebrüder Thonet’s first serious rivals once the latter’s patent for solid wood bending had expired, launched their own imitation of Thonet’s Rocking Chair No. 1 in 1870. Thonet, meanwhile, continued to develop ever-new variants of the chair. The 1885 Thonet catalogue features fifteen such models, while the 1911 catalogue devotes a full ten pages exclusively to rocking chairs.
Text: Eva B. Ottillinger
