Gerrit Rietveld

The Estate of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld
Christie's Amsterdam, Rietveld and the Rietveld Academie, June 7, 1988, lot 401
Private Collection
Christie's New York, June 13, 2002, lot 72

Daniele Baroni, The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, New York, 1978, p. 159 , no. 65
Marijke Küper and Ida van Zijl, Gerrit Th. Rietveld:  The Complete Works, Utrecht, 1992, p. 234
Peter Vöge, The Complete Rietveld Furniture, 1993, pp. 140-141, pl. 291 
Ida van Zijl, Gerrit Rietveld, London, 2012, p. 197

This lot is offered together with five letters from Gerrit Rietveld and his son.

Sotheby’s would like to thank Rob Driessen and Jurjen Creman for their assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.


Rietveld’s design for an easy chair skillfully incorporates modern plywood-bending technology to deliver a design assembled from the minimum number of components, and with no visible means of connecting. Both in terms of materials and concept, the "Danish" chair presents as a unified, one-piece entity potentially suitable for serial production. However, despite the elemental simplicity of the design it would appear that very few examples were ultimately produced, and that several of these, including the present example, were retained by the designer. Furthermore, amongst those extant examples, of which around ten only can be counted to exist today, there is a strong degree of variety both in terms of the shapes of the elements, and moreover the colors used, with no two examples being painted alike.

Of these 10 examples, two are prototypes: one of metal, and one of fiberboard, and both are retained in the Centraal Museum, along with an example painted red with white rims. Other painted examples are retained in the Delft Technical University, and on loan to the Rijksmuseum. There exist three examples in natural, unpainted plywood, these being retained in the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, and the Vitra Design Museum.

Only two examples of this important design are in private collections - the present example, and another grey-painted with white rims, sold at auction in 2009. The present example is unique amongst all painted versions of this design, by virtue of the blue-painted plywood strap that contributes to a sensation of visual weightlessness. The chair acquired the title “Danish Chair” subsequent to an exhibition in Denmark in 1952. 

- S. A.