Cut Leather Armchair S411 by W. Gispen for Thonet, 1930s

Want to Know More About W.H. Gispen?

W.H. Gispen was a Dutch industrial designer best known for his Giso lamps and functionalist steel-tube furniture. Born in 1890 in Amsterdam, he studied design at the Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Science in Rotterdam as part of the architectural department. In 1915, after only two years, Gispen left school early, partly due to the outbreak of World War One. In 1916 he set up a small smithy, which would eventually develop into the famous Gispen Factory for Metalwork. In 1949, Gispen left the company because of tensions between him and the co-director of the firm W. van Osselen. He began to lecture at the Royal Academy at The Hague, co-founded the Kembo factory and, at the age of seventy-five, began to take etching lessons.

The Many Styles of W.H. Gispen

Gispen’s pieces took inspiration from numerous sources, drawing on De Stijl, Bauhaus, and Constructivism, to name a few. In the early years, Gispen’s designs were reminiscent of the expressionism of the Amsterdamse School and of Art Nouveau. Alongside ornamental wrought-iron work, he began producing items like firesides,Table Lamps , wooden furniture, and Clocks . From 1923 onwards, Gispen was introduced to, and subsequently inspired by, the Bauhaus movement in The Netherlands. At the international exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, he received an award for his ornamental iron-work and became aware of Le Corbusier, Constructivism and other French modernists. These influences inspired him to create the Giso lamp and the armchair no. 412. Made with “Scientific Lighting” aesthetic and demands in mind, these lamps are still celebrated today.

W.H. Gispen and His Legacy

In 1916 Gispen purchased his own kiln at the Coolschestraat in Rotterdam, where he started his own workshop in September of that year. It was here where he produced some of his most memorable pieces. His success was in part due to the fact that he was responsible for his own marketing and advertising, as well as opening showrooms in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels and later in London, Paris, and other cities abroad. During the Second World War, metalwork was prohibited outside the war industry, so the factory began to produce parts for aircrafts. In 1920 W.H. Gispen co-founded the architects' circle Opbouw, which created the foundations for Dutch Functionalism. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam organised the first exposition ever dedicated to Gispen in 1981, which focused on his lamp designs from 1916 to 1949. That same year, Gispen died on May 10.

Thonet—the oldest surviving furniture company in the world—began its long life in 1819, when cabinetmaker Michael Thonet (1796-1871) established a furniture workshop in Boppard, Germany. A proponent of the Biedermeier style, he specialized in chairs, tables, and storage pieces characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation, and an emphasis on functionalist principles. By the 1830s, Thonet’s experiments in laminated and steam-bent wood furniture, like his famous Boppard Chair (1836), brought international acclaim. Thonet’s designs achieved a combination of lightness, durability, and comfort unknown in European furniture at the time.

A great fan of his work, Prince Metternich of Austria invited Thonet to present his designs to the Viennese court in 1842. Finding so much support there, Thonet opened a new company in Vienna in 1849. In 1853, he transferred his company to his sons, and Gebrüder Thonet was established.

Through the second half of the 19th century, Gebrüder Thonet designs grew increasingly popular with the cultural vanguard, especially among progressive design thinkers and tastemakers. One design in particular, the No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), led the way to international success: the chair’s innovative bending technique was well suited to industrial production, and its rationalized, easily assembled structure allowed for efficient packing and shipping. In 1850, Anna Daum famously outfitted her fashionable Viennese café with No. 14 Chairs, and by the 1870s, Gebrüder Thonet had sales offices across Europe and the US. To date, more than 50 million No. 14 Chairs have been sold worldwide–not counting the untold pirated copies.

Iconic pieces from the traditional Gebrüder Thonet collection include Rocking Chair No. 1 (1860), No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), Adolf Loos’s Café Museum Chair (1899), No. 209 Armchair (ca. 1900), Otto Wagner’s No. 247 Postal Savings Bank Chair (1904), and Josef Hoffmann’s No. 811 (1925). In the early years of the 20th century, Gebrüder Thonet also began producing designs in bent tubular steel by Bauhaus masters like Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam.

In the aftermath of World War II, Thonet lost all of its production facilities in Eastern Europe, and the sales office at Vienna’s Stephansplatz had been destroyed. Between 1945 and 1953, Georg Thonet, the great-grandson of company founder Michael Thonet, led the rebuilding. Economic success returned quickly. In the ensuing decades, the company commissioned designs from many outstanding designers, such as Verner Panton, Pierre Paulin, Norman Foster, James Irvine, Piero Lissoni, and Stefan Diez. Classic Thonet pieces can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

In 1976 Thonet was divided into two separate German and Austrian companies, which remain independent of each other. Today, Thonet GmbH is headquartered in Frankenberg, Germany and continues to manufacture the original, bentwood and tubular steel designs alongside new pieces by contemporary, international architects and designers. Originally opened in 1861 by Thonet himself, the furniture factory TON (Továrna Ohýbaného Nábytku), which is located in what is known today as the Czech Republic, continues to manufacture Thonet designs. 

* All images courtesy of Thonet.de