Le Recamier

No. 012

Cherrywood Dining Set. c. 1937

One for One | Status: Available in Chicago

Le Recamier is not Art Déco, and we are not presenting it as such. The gondola chair is a French form from the late nineteenth century, fashionable from the Restauration onward and produced steadily long after. The gondola chairs, which gained popularity during the Restoration, continued as fashionable accent pieces in many French homes. It became one of the most reproduced and most lived in of all French dining models, and it stayed a fixture of bourgeois dining rooms straight through the decade we cover. The average French household setting a table in the 1930s was far more likely to own a traditional revival set like this than any piece of Art Déco.

French neoclassical dining set in the Restauration and Louis Philippe tradition.
The chairs give the set its name. The gondola back wraps the sitter in a deep curve inherited from Empire seating and the Greek klismos before it, softened under the Restauration into the enveloping line seen here, with a wide central splat, a scrolled crest, and sabre rear legs. The table holds to the same plain idiom, round and opening at the center on a leaf, carried on tapered legs without carving or applied ornament. Both were made for daily dining in warm native woods rather than gilt and bronze, and that plainness is why the type outlived its period.
Neoclassical revival, rooted in the Restauration / Charles X era (roughly 1815 to 1830), carried on through Louis-Philippe.
Private Home of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, France. Acquired May 2026.
Authenticity assessed.
Presque Studio, Chicago, USA
Table: 26½ Ø × 43¼ (inch)
Chair: 17¾ × 19 × 35½ (inch)