Pair of 1930s René Prou Slipper Chairs

Name: Pair of 1930s René Prou Slipper Chairs
Brand: René Prou
Price: 10000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

These earthbound chairs appear to be weightless. Such is the illusion that the designer René Prou was able to create in 1930s Paris with the aid of a highly-skilled upholsterer. Before going out on his own in 1920, Prou had worked for two decorating firms. In the years that followed, he opened several showrooms, and, as a gun for hire, designed porcelains for Sèvres, textiles for Le Manach, and hardware for Fontaine et Cie. At the Paris 1925 Exposition he exhibited rooms in several pavilions, and presented a boutique stocked with his own designs. From 1920 to 1946 he would present rooms in nearly every annual Salon d’Automne and Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. He installed a dining room and first-class stateroom in the 1921 ocean liner Paris, which led to commissions for the Ile-de-France, the Normandie, and other ships that he fitted out entirely. The national railroad took notice, commissioning sleeping, dining, and lounging cars for their fabled Train Blu and other express trains. Prou also designed an hotel in Biarritz, and various banks and stores in Paris, as well as the salon de thé of the Lido, the famed Champs Elysée music hall. In addition, from 1928 to 1932 he ran the Atelier Pomone, the interior design studio and furniture line of the Bonne Marché department store. And so, between the wars, pretty much anyone who traveled to or within France, shopped in Paris, or made the scene there, passed through a Prou interior. In the 1930's, Prou softened his Art Deco rectilinearity to the Rococo curvaceousness seen our chairs. This kept him in the swim, and, as the Depression set in, the black, as commissions came in from private clients who were still in the money, and the Mobilier Nationale, the branch of government that stockpiles furniture for embassies and offices. Other commissions came in from abroad, including one for the vast Assembly Room of the League of Nations in Geneva, the no less vast dining room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, and a suite of reception rooms in the Mitsubishi Department Store in Tokyo. Our tufted slipper chairs, in a Louis XV-inspired style, embody the refinement that Prou achieved in the late 1930s. He drafted variants of this design, with broken-pediment backs and cabriole feet, for a 1939 exhibition room, and a 1943 Paris apartment. By then, the Nazis had taken Paris, yet Prou continued to adhere to an ideal that he articulated years before, when telling a journalist, “I’ve always tried to make French things that don’t owe anything to the foreigner.”.

Creator:

René Prou (Designer)

Dimensions:

Height: 35 in (88.9 cm)Width: 20 in (50.8 cm)Depth: 20 in (50.8 cm)Seat Height: 15.5 in (39.37 cm)

Sold As:

Set of 2

Style:

Art Deco (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Silk,Sycamore

Place of Origin:

France