A Set of Four French Oak and Rush Side Chairs, Mid-20th Century

A Set of Four French Oak and Rush Side Chairs, Mid-20th Century

Each with a woven rush back panel secured at the corners by turned wooden boss finials, above a conforming rush seat, the square section back uprights continuing to square tapering rear legs, the front legs of baluster-turned form united by a turned front stretcher and plain square-section side and rear stretchers; the oak of warm honey-brown patination throughout.

The form drawing upon the vernacular tradition of provincial French chair-making, in particular the chaise paysanne of the Auvergne and Burgundy regions, where rush seating and turned-oak construction remained in continuous production from the seventeenth century. The present examples, with their robustly turned front legs and the characteristic diamond-pattern rush weave to both seat and back, reflect the revival of interest in regional craft traditions during the mid-twentieth century and are closely related to the celebrated Chaise de Méribel designed by Charlotte Perriand circa 1950 — itself a deliberate reinterpretation of ancestral Alpine and rural French prototypes. Chairs of this type were produced by regional ateliers in the Massif Central and the Rhône-Alpes and have since entered the canon of twentieth-century design through Perriand's celebrated advocacy of the vernacular.