19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1997 by Barry R. Harwood

In 1855 Samuel Colt (1814-1862) remarked that there was "nothing that could not be produced by machinery."(1) This enthusiasm for the nascent machine age was widely endorsed in the United States, and although it began to have the expected effects of standardization and efficiency on the manufacture of Colt's firearms, the furniture industry remained tied to the old methods.(2) Machine-powered lathes and saws were used for simple tasks and for making furniture at the low end of the market, but the American furniture trade still relied on handwork in the second half of the nineteenth century.

For a few furniture designers, however, the idea of the machine began to exercise an aesthetic influence. For this small group of forward-looking designers, including George Jacob Hunzinger [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], the machine provided the principal source of design inspiration as opposed to the historical revival and other exotic styles that characterized most furniture designs of the period.(3) Indeed, the crisply turned members and geometric decorative details of the pared down frames of Hunzinger's furniture resemble parts of the machines that produced them. His most adventurous designs are characterized by abstraction, distinguishing them from those of his contemporaries and forming an aesthetic link to the twentieth century [ILLUSTRATION FOR Pl. III OMITTED]

Not only Hunzinger's designs but his concepts of production and marketing seem to anticipate modem practices. Beginning in 1860, for example, he secured twenty-one technical patents for ingenious extension, swivel-top, and nesting tables; folding and reclining chairs; convertible beds; structural innovations; and novel applications of new and existing materials. In the eighteenth century furniture that could be manipulated to serve multiple purposes was made for the amusement of the European upper class. In the second half of the nineteenth century convertible furniture such as sofa beds and portable folding chairs answered the more practical needs of the urban middle class living in restricted spaces. The interest in convertible furniture .was part of an American mania for patents from 1850 to 1890 that led one historian to call these "the decades of patent furniture."(4)

Patent protection was guaranteed by the United States Constitution, which had granted only 6,981 patents by 1850. By 1900 the total had swelled to 640,167. Manufacturers such as Hunzinger, who specialized in patented furniture, made the appeal of novelty and innovation their marketing tools and labeled their furniture with the patent dates, which they advertised as well [ILLUSTRATION FOR Pl. II FIGURE 2 OMITTED].

Hunzinger made a broad variety of chairs in a wide price range. The same chair, for example, would be offered in various woods, plain or stained. The early chairs were usually of maple and walnut and then, beginning in the 1880s, oak was introduced. Hunzinger also ebonized and gilded chairs to appeal to the affluent consumer [ILLUSTRATION FOR Pl. V OMITTED]. It was in the choice of upholstery, however, that the buyer was offered the greatest selection. A remarkable furniture catalogue of 1876 issued by a wholesale distributor reveals how the wholesale price of one version of Hunzinger's patent 1866 folding-reclining chair could vary: it cost $34.66 for the frame alone; "Tufted in muslin, $44.00; Tufted in Terry with Marquette or fine Tapestry stripe, $53.33; in Satin, with Satin Stripe, Silk Fringe in front, $72.00."(5) In other words, luxurious upholstery could more than double the price of the same chair.

Hunzinger's progressive production procedures ensured greater efficiency and wider consumer choice. Interchangeable parts, for example, attest to Hunzinger's economical search for new forms. The bottoms of the day bed in Plate VII and the settee in Plate XIII, for example, are essentially the same.

Hunzinger was born on September 12, 1835, in Tuttlingen, in the province of Wurttemberg in southwestern Germany. His family, of Swiss origin, had been cabinetmakers since the seventeenth century.(6) He was the eldest of four chidren and at the age of fourteen began his apprenticeship in his father's shop. At eighteen he went to Geneva, Switzerland, for two years as a journeyman, and then, in 1855, he immigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, New York, among an expanding German population.(7) He was well established by the time his father died in 1865, leaving the German business to a brother and a stepbrother. Descendants of an uncle are still woodworkers in Tuttlingen.

The first secure documentation of George Hunzinger in America is his marriage contract dated December 25, 1859. His wife was Marie Susanne Grieb (d. 1908), also from Tuttlingen, whom he married in the German Evangelical Church on Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn. Her father was a capmaker, and the following year Hunzinger is listed for the first time in the Brooklyn directory, as a cabinetmaker living at 117 1/2 Court Street with his wife and her parents. Within a year Hunzinger established a furniture shop on Centre Street in lower Manhattan, but it is not fully known how he entered the cabinetmaking trade between his arrival in 1855 and his listing in the Brooklyn directory in 1860. His obituary offers only one tantalizing lead. Before he set out on his own he worked for Auguste Pottier (1823-1896), "the celebrated cabinet maker,"(8) although when and for how long is not known.