Four-Legged Walnut Stool with Interlaced Leather Straps Inside the Frame

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Four-Legged Walnut Stool with Interlaced Leather Straps Inside the Frame

About the Item

Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings (1905-1976) was a British-born architect who made his career in America. On leaving university with an architecture degree he had a brief spell as a designer of ocean liner interiors before taking up the job of art director for British International Pictures at Elstree Studios. He then joined Charles Duveen, an interior designer and brother of the renowned art dealer Joseph Duveen, in his London firm. But it was in America that Robsjohn-Gibbings would make his name. In the 1930s and 1940s he was arguably America’s most important architect, decorator and furniture designer, whose work was sought after by the rich and famous. He created a symbiosis of Classical and Art Deco design which he arrived at through trips to the architectural sites of Egypt, Italy and Greece and extensive study of Classical artefacts in the world’s museums, where he made meticulous sketches of the furniture and motifs depicted on ancient Greek vases, bronzes, and sculptures. In 1936 he opened a studio and showroom on Madison Avenue in New York, where he welcomed an impressive roster of customers, then went on to design houses and furniture for enormously wealthy clients, most famously the Casa Encantada, Hilda Boldt Weber’s mansion in Bel-Air, for which he created over 200 pieces of furniture. In 1943 Robsjohn-Gibbings became the senior designer for the Widdicomb furniture company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, working there till 1956 and developing his personal signature of modern historicism, informed by the visual vocabulary of the classical Greek world. He created the Klismos chair, which subsequently led to a complete line of furniture, made by the Greek cabinet-makers Susan and Eleftherios Saridis, whom he’d met on one of his trips to Greece. This new collection was a unique attempt to reveal through careful scholarship and craftsmanship the masterly design of the golden age of Greek civilization. Robsjohn-Gibbings eventually moved to Athens, where he died. Among his clients had been names such as Doris Duke, Alfred A. Knopf, Thelma Chrysler Foy, Elizabeth Arden, Neiman Marcus and Aristotle Onassis. He was honoured by the Waters Award in 1950 and by the Elsie de Wolfe Award in 1962. This four-legged walnut stool with interlaced leather straps inside the frame or 'Diphros' is a recreation of the Greek stool carved by Phidias and his sculptors on the Parthenon frieze ca. 442-438 BC, which frieze can be admired in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Comparison with stools of this design shown on Greek vases of the ninth to eight centuries BC indicates that Greek craftsmen pent over four hundred years perfecting the stool before achieving the beauty of this model. Where strength is necessary at the top of the leg, the form – bold and rounded – merges with the horizontal seat frame in one unbroken surface. The stool has the intrinsic confidence, serenity and nobility identified with the finest achievements of Greek architecture. Photographs of the Phidias frieze and of this 'Diphros' model are depicted in the book by Robsjohn-Gibbings and Pullon that they dedicated to the furniture of Classical Greece. Walnut and leather The bottom carries the stamp ΣΑΡΙΔΗΣ, the number 15416, and the nameplate DESIGNED BY T. H. ROBSJOHN GIBBINGS MANUFACTURED BY SARIDIS OF ATHENS H. 44cm, Seat H. 42 cm, W. 55 cm, D. 55 cm Sources: Robsjohn-Gibbings, T. H., & Pullin, C. W. (1963), Furniture of Classical Greece, New York: Borzoi Book by Alfred E. Knopf Inc., p.23, p. 84-87; website of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art http://www.aaa.si.edu/.Sources: Robsjohn-Gibbings, T. H., & Pullin, C. W. (1963), Furniture of Classical Greece, New York: Borzoi Book by Alfred E. Knopf Inc., p. 84-87; website of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art http://www.aaa.si.edu/.

Creator:
T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings (Designer)
Dimensions:
Height: 17.32 in (44 cm)Width: 21.65 in (55 cm)Depth: 21.65 in (55 cm)Seat Height: 16.53 in (41.99 cm)
Sold As:
Set of 2
Style:
Other (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Leather,Walnut,Carved,Cross-Banded
Place of Origin:
Sweden
Period:
1960-1969
Date of Manufacture:
1960s
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use.
Seller Location:
Brussels & Antwerp, BE
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU95163398402

Shop All T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings

T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings

British-born designer, interior decorator and author T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings was one of the great American tastemakers in the middle decades of the 20th century. Much like Edward Wormley, Robsjohn-Gibbings was a design classicist by education and inclination, but he would come to create some of the most gracious and livable modern furnishings of the era.

Robsjohn-Gibbings studied architecture at the University of London, then held various jobs that included designing décors for passenger liners and working as the art director of a film studio. In the early 1930s, while employed by the upper-crust interior designer Charles J. Duveen, Robsjohn-Gibbings experienced an epiphany during a visit to the British Museum.

Examining the furniture depicted on ancient Greek ceramics — lithe stools and klismos chairs — he realized that he had found a design touchstone. By 1936, Robsjohn-Gibbings had moved to New York and set up a showroom on Madison Avenue for his modern reinterpretations of Classical Greek designs. Aided by contacts he’d developed while working with Duveen, he quickly established a clientele that included Elizabeth Arden, Doris Duke and Thelma Chrysler Foy.

Through his writings for magazines and books, Robsjohn-Gibbings earned a public following and was established as an urbane arbiter of taste. From 1943 to 1956, he produced an understated line of modernist furnishings for Widdicomb, which included one of the icons of the period: the tiered, biomorphic Mesa coffee table (1951). Robsjohn-Gibbings moved to Athens, Greece, in 1966, and created a new line of antiquity-inspired pieces for the firm Saridis. The series turned out to be his swan song.

Collectors’ interest in Robsjohn-Gibbings was reignited in the 1980s when the 200-plus pieces from his 1936–38 commission for the Bel-Air estate of Los Angeles socialite Hilda Boldt Weber — pared-down neoclassical pieces rendered in blond wood (with the occasional flourish) — came on the market. (Up until then, the collection had remained in the house, despite its having changed hands several times.)

But his work for Widdicomb remains his most widely known, appreciated for its elegance and generous proportions. Robsjohn-Gibbings despised the stern aesthetic associated with his Bauhaus contemporaries, and a keynote of his modernist pieces is that they have no sharp angles. His chair and sofa frames, table legs and even many cabinets feature softly contoured edges. In whatever style he designed, Robsjohn-Gibbings was guided by simplicity and timelessness. He wanted his furniture to be lived with happily.

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