1950s Teak and Tan Leather Chieftain's Chair by Finn Juhl

Finn Juhl (1912–89) is often credited with having played a pivotal role in the excitement around Danish modern design that swept through the United States during the 1950s. Juhl’s sculptural Chieftain chair, which he designed in 1949, was considered a renewal of Danish design traditions and is a long-celebrated milestone in the furniture maker’s legacy. Mid-century Scandinavian design emphasized warm woods, gentle lines and subtle curves, and while Juhl designed the Chieftain chair with those high standards in mind, modern art was his biggest inspiration.

Years before Juhl completed the Chieftain chair — his most desired piece of furniture in a long and groundbreaking career — the Danish designer was frequenting museums and on a path to study art history. Instead, at his father’s request, Juhl pursued a degree in architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He worked at architect Vilhelm Lauritzen’s firm, collaborated on chairs with cabinetmaker Niels Vodder and opened his own practice in 1945.

Along with a group of other young Danish craftsmen such as Hans Wegner and Arne Jacobsen, Juhl sought to reawaken the idea of design in their country, pioneering the use of teak in furniture making and going on to create expressive, experimental pieces like the Chieftain.

Juhl’s award-winning Chieftain chair, upholstered in leather with its high back and organically curving armrests, is an imposing piece that dominates in both size and extravagance, but also requires a significant amount of space around it. “Perhaps I had a vague idea for some time that I wanted to design something bigger,” Juhl said of the teak chair, the form of which references Egyptian furniture and tribal art.

The original armchair was in production for a very short period at Baker Furniture and elsewhere over the years. It was relaunched in 2002 by House of Finn Juhl / One Collection. Original versions of the beloved Chieftain chair rarely sell for less than six figures at auction.

Along with Hans Wegner, Arne Jacobsen and Børge Mogensen, Finn Juhl was one of the great masters of mid-20th-century Danish design. Juhl was the first among that group to have his work promoted overseas, bringing the character of the nation’s furnishings — and the inherent principles of grace, craftsmanship and utility on which they were based — to an international audience. A stylistic maverick, Juhl embraced expressive, free-flowing shapes in chair and sofa designs much earlier than his colleagues, yet even his quietest pieces incorporate supple, curving forms that are at once elegant and ergonomic.

As a young man, Juhl hoped to become an art historian, but his father steered him into a more practical course of study in architecture. He began designing furniture in the late 1930s, a discipline in which, despite his education, Juhl was self-taught, and quite proud of the fact. His earliest works, designed in the late 1930s, are perhaps his most idiosyncratic. The influence of contemporary art is clear in Juhl's 1939 Pelican chair: an almost Surrealist take on the classic wing chair. Critics reviled the piece, however; one said it looked like a "tired walrus." Juhl had tempered his creativity by 1945, when the Danish furniture-making firm Niels Vodder began to issue his designs. Yet his now-classic NV 45 armchair still demonstrates panache, with a seat that floats above the chair’s teak frame.

Juhl first exhibited his work in the United States in 1950, championed by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., an influential design critic and scion of America’s most prominent family of modern architecture and design patrons. (Kaufmann’s father commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the house “Fallingwater.”) Juhl quickly won a following for such signature designs as the supremely comfortable Chieftan lounge chair, the biomorphic Baker sofa, and the Judas table, a piece ornamented with stylish inlaid silver plaquettes.

As you will see from the offerings on 1stDibs, Finn Juhl’s furniture — as well as his lighting, ceramics, tableware and accessories — has an air of relaxed sophistication and elegance that is unique in the realm of mid-20th-century design.