JH 501 "The Chair" by Hans J. Wegner

Danish master cabinetmaker Johannes Hansen is best known for a celebrated partnership with legendary Scandinavian modernist designer Hans Wegner that lasted half a century. The sophisticated and sculptural chairs, tables and cabinets that Wegner designed and Hansen built earned Wegner worldwide acclaim, and brought meaningful business opportunities to Hansen and his modest workshop.

Hansen was born in 1886 and apprenticed as a cabinetmaker in his early years, opening a workshop and showroom in Copenhagen. In 1927, he helped establish the annual Copenhagen Cabinetmakers’ Guild Exhibition. Later, at the age of 55, Hansen began working with Danish furniture designer Hans J. Wegner, then only 26. With Wegner creating and Hansen executing on his partner’s complex designs, they developed furniture to sell in Hansen's showroom. A business relationship of this type was common in 20th-century Danish furniture making, and Hansen and Wegner enjoyed a prolific and renowned collaboration.

Wegner’s career began in cabinetry before he transitioned to furniture design in the 1940s. He is among the most celebrated figures for collectors of mid-century modern and Scandinavian works of the era. One of the first well-known entries for the Cabinetmakers’ Guild Exhibitions authored by Wegner and built by Hansen was the 1942 Lattice chair, a red Cuban mahogany dining room chair with an upholstered leather seat. The Peacock chair, an iconic design that followed in 1947, was the pair's take on a traditional English Windsor chair. It featured flattened spindles along the back resembling the feathers of a peacock tail — it wasn’t exactly an emblem of the pared-back functionality prioritized by Kaare Klint, Wegner’s former instructor at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Wegner would go on to design nearly 500 chairs over the course of his life — among them are the Wishbone chair, the Papa Bear chair and the Round chair. The latter, which is often simply called “The Chair,” was manufactured by Hansen and made its debut at the Guild Exhibition in 1949. It was declared “the most beautiful chair in the world” by Interiors magazine a year later, and a pair of the iconic seats appeared on the first nationally televised presidential debate in the United States in 1960.

After Hansen died in 1961, his son, Poul Hansen, took over the business and continued working with Wegner. The company closed in the 1990s, but today, Hansen and Wegner's collaborative legacy endures in collections around the world.

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