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GEORG HULBE (1851-1918) Armchair circa 1891 possibly for Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, carved oak, close nail upholstered and embossed leather height 43 3/4in (111cm); width 28 3/4in (73cm); depth 24 1/2in (62cm) image 1
GEORG HULBE (1851-1918) Armchair circa 1891 possibly for Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, carved oak, close nail upholstered and embossed leather height 43 3/4in (111cm); width 28 3/4in (73cm); depth 24 1/2in (62cm) image 2
GEORG HULBE (1851-1918) Armchair circa 1891 possibly for Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, carved oak, close nail upholstered and embossed leather height 43 3/4in (111cm); width 28 3/4in (73cm); depth 24 1/2in (62cm) image 3
GEORG HULBE (1851-1918) Armchair circa 1891 possibly for Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, carved oak, close nail upholstered and embossed leather height 43 3/4in (111cm); width 28 3/4in (73cm); depth 24 1/2in (62cm) image 4
GEORG HULBE (1851-1918) Armchair circa 1891 possibly for Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, carved oak, close nail upholstered and embossed leather height 43 3/4in (111cm); width 28 3/4in (73cm); depth 24 1/2in (62cm) image 5
GEORG HULBE (1851-1918) Armchair circa 1891 possibly for Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, carved oak, close nail upholstered and embossed leather height 43 3/4in (111cm); width 28 3/4in (73cm); depth 24 1/2in (62cm) image 6
Lot 44W

GEORG HULBE (1851-1918)
Armchair
circa 1891
possibly for Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, carved oak, close nail upholstered and embossed leather
height 43 3/4in (111cm); width 28 3/4in (73cm); depth 24 1/2in (62cm)

30 September 2025, 12:00 EDT
New York

US$15,000 - US$20,000

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GEORG HULBE (1851-1918)

Armchair
circa 1891
possibly for Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, carved oak, close nail upholstered and embossed leather
height 43 3/4in (111cm); width 28 3/4in (73cm); depth 24 1/2in (62cm)

Footnotes

This chair belongs to a small group of similar chairs of Celtic inspiration made by Hamburg leather worker, bookbinder and furniture maker Georg Hulbe. Hulbe exhibited an identical chair, together with other fine leather goods including a screen and bookbindings, at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. By 1910 his firm grew to employ over 200 workers and the Hulbe-Haus, his studio, gallery and shop, can still be seen in Hamburg today.

The chair bears remarkable similarity to a set of chairs supplied by Louis Comfort Tiffany for the library of H.O. Havermeyer at his house at 1 E 66th St, New York City in 1892, an example of which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1992.125). Owing to the similarity with the Havermeyer chairs it was previously thought that all the similar chairs were made in New York by, or at least designed by, Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, however the image of the Hulbe chair in reports of the 1900 Paris Exposition (see fig. 1) sheds some new light on those attributions.

However, the Tiffany firm did have an agent in Europe, the Hamburg-born art connoisseur and dealer Siegfried Bing, who had a large European import/export art operation with offices in Berlin and Paris. As well as Tiffany, Bing had other American trade clients including Grueby Faience Co. and The Rookwood Pottery, and he knew the Havermeyers as important private collectors, having sold to them in 1894 a collection of Japanese textiles which they later donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Given these close associations, it is entirely possible that Bing recommended Hulbe's work to Tiffany who ordered models of this chair for the Havermeyers. Another similar chair to the present example is in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (OAO1817).

Provenance
'Jacques Grange - Collectionneur', Sotheby's, Paris, November 22, 2017, lot 47

Additional information

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